Somebody will put a small chocolate cup of dark red liqueur in your hand in Óbidos, and it may as well be here. The house opened in 1956 as an antiques shop, turned itself into a bar in 1975 and is listed on Comércio com História, the Portuguese state’s register of businesses of historic and cultural interest — which is the reason it is on this list and the fifteen ginjinha stalls further down the street are not.
The room is the point. It is one narrow, dark space on Rua Direita hung and stacked with the unsold contents of the antiques shop: ceramics, bottles, murals, oddments nailed to every surface, and barely enough floor for a dozen people. It serves ginja by the glass and in the edible chocolate cup, with flamed chouriço, bread and cheese as the standing snack.
Now the honesty. Ginjinha is a sour-cherry liqueur of the 17th century, usually credited to a friar in Lisbon, and it has nothing to do with the Middle Ages. The chocolate cup is a 20th-century invention that fits neatly with the town’s international chocolate festival, running since 2002. What you are buying is a good local drink in a room with a real history, not a medieval experience, and anyone selling it to you as one is selling.
It takes ten minutes. Do it in the evening, when the coaches have gone and the bar belongs to whoever is still in town, rather than at two in the afternoon when there is a line of people photographing their cups.
