Coimbra Restaurant

Portuguese cuisine is lusty, soulful, rib-sticking fare in which cod - the salted, dried kind called bacalhau - is God. In the wrong hands it can be tough, fishy-tasting stuff. Luckily Coimbra has a good hand with this Portuguese staple and more than a dozen dishes to prove it. Cod fritters are light, crisp, and greaseless; cod sautéed with onions, garlic, potatoes, and hard-cooked egg is satisfying right down to your toenails. Porky chorizo are plump and tasty, and a combo of tender chunks of pork with fat little in-shell clams is downright delicious. Scrape the Hershey's-like sauce off a wedge of cheesecake-dense flan and it's pretty good too.