Lisbon, Portugal places to eat: Cervejaria Ramiro has all that is great about seafood

You have to respect a place that serves steak sandwiches for dessert. Especially when that place is a seafood restaurant.

Cervejaria Ramiro is packed tonight, full to bursting with locals and travellers, with the young and the elderly, with families yelling at each other across tables and old blokes nursing beers at the bar, with wide-eyed tourists taking photos of the fish tanks and couples trying in vain to have a quiet date. Waiters flow through this chaos with practiced nonchalance, slinging plates and calling orders. The chefs look serious as they bang out dish after dish of the freshest and tastiest seafood in all of Lisbon.

When you order prawns at Ramiro, you get prawns. Just prawns. Two big, juicy crustaceans fresh from the Atlantic, sliced down the middle, grilled with salt and a squeeze of lemon, served side by side on a metal plate. When you order a langostine, you get a langostine. A single perfect specimen, blushing red from a pot of boiling water, served on a metal plate.

Everything at Ramiro is like this. The clams are like this, the crabs are like this, the goose barnacles are like this, and the lobster is like this. Very few flavours are added. There are no vegetables or salads. Everything tastes as close to its natural state as possible.

And that is why you need to finish the meal with something more substantial, to ensure you're sated. At Ramiro that comes in the form of a "prego", a Portuguese steak sandwich, a simple cut of beef with a little mustard, slapped on a dense roll. Dessert is served.

Cervejaria Ramiro is not just everything that's great about seafood – it's everything that's great about Portuguese food, and in particular the cuisine of the nation's capital, Lisbon. Food here is unpretentious and simple. It's almost universally ignored by the rest of the world – when was the last time you went out for Portuguese? – and even in its homeland it's not exactly spoken about in hushed, reverent tones. It is what it is: modest, and yet very, very good. Food in Lisbon is the slabs of bacalhao, or salted cod, that are fried and served with potatoes and olives at Merendinha do Arco, a small eatery with communal tables and cheap wine. It's the deep-fried baby mackerels served whole at the friendly Taberna da Rua das Flores. It's the pasteis de nata, or Portuguese tarts, that people line up around the block for at Pasteis de Belem. It's the tuna, marinated and tinned by a family that has been doing it for generations at Conserveira de Lisboa.

Food is relished in Lisbon, it's eaten with gusto and joy. It tastes incredibly good. It's just not taken too seriously. Even some of the city's best restaurants have a sense of fun to them. There's a bar called "By The Wine" – an odd attempt at an English pun, though it serves some of the best modern-style cuisine in Lisbon. Sea Me has a similar story – dodgy name, amazing food.