This is the story of the restaurant that hides behind a movie theater. And it has to signpost the way so that new customers can find it, despite it being right in the heart of Lisbon, right next to the Botanical Gardens. It is also the story of those who were left without a large neighborhood where in times gone by “Portuguese Broadway” attracted crowds. And yet, contrary to all this, it is the story in which Gina, “Rui da Gina” and “Gininha” — three generations of the same family — managed to make a business that has been going on for 50 years even more profitable. First, the taste of Trás-os-Montes meat. Then, hitchhiking the pandemic.
It has been an exercise in endurance. Being hidden and unaccompanied is, perhaps, a lesser evil when revisiting the hardships that A Gina restaurant had to endure for refusing to leave Parque Mayer.
The owner, Georgina Alves Pinto, will reveal to us later what led her to set foot. But first we sat with her son, Rui Gonçalves, in one of the five rooms of the restaurant that she helps manage, going back several years, to one of the most difficult moments in this space. The thing is, after Parque Mayer was purchased by the Bragaparques group in 2005 — a deal that would give rise to a giant legal imbroglio for more than 15 years —, there were phases in which “it was impossible to walk here”, he recalls to Negócios.
“Mayer Park was a bit abandoned, with arguments between Bragaparques and the city council — it’s mine, it’s yours, it stays, it doesn’t stay, then it goes to the city council…” until, “a few years ago, they started to get it back.” It wasn’t enough for this family to lace up their shoes, they also had to clean it: “Here the street was a mess. Anyone who arrived at the entrance to the park looked and it looked like a construction site. The street was full of holes… Forget it! One little shame.”
But Gina survived. “Our customers continued to come – fewer, but we managed to stay afloat. The rest all left”, after others had already left in previous periods. Rui, who is now 46 years old, remembers. “There were one, two, three, four… in total, when I was a kid, there must have been at least ten restaurants here. We were the resistant ones, the only ones that stayed. And they want to stay here.”
