Something Fishy: Tinned Sardines

Times Square, home to all manner of hucksters and peddlers—from cosplaying Elmos in their matted red fur to Eric Ripert and his fluted clamshells filled with caviar priced at $150 an ounce—has a relatively new pop-up store devoted exclusively to sardines that I visited a few months ago. The name is appropriate to the carney-esque place. Called the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine (sort of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but for oily forage fish), the shop is the first U.S. retail outlet of a popular Portuguese manufacturer that’s been around since 1942. It’s set up like a Disney arcade-cum-candy shop, inhabiting a narrow two-story space with wooden cubbies rising floor to ceiling housing tins in flavors that range from tomato to sweet pepper. More are neatly displayed on tables and in spinning wooden racks.

It’s not the stuff you’ll find shelved next to the albacore-packed-in-spring-water Chicken of the Sea at your local Stop-n-Shop. It’s instead the product of Ovalor do Tempo, the company that owns Comur, “an artisanal maker of Portuguese tinned fish.” Or so says the poker-faced New York Times. I never thought I’d be typing the words “artisanal maker of Portuguese tinned fish” but here we are in 2024 when everything short of a Dorito Sweet Spicy Chili tortilla chip can be plausibly described as either "curated" or "artisanal."

The humble sardine gets less humble

Sardines, according to Wikipedia, are epipelagic fish, a description I’d never heard before but that I find as delightful as the stacks of them soaring to the ceiling of the twee pop-up store. That means they live in the part of the ocean that allows just enough light to penetrate for photosynthesis.

I also find sardines themselves delightful, which I realize puts me decidedly in the minority. Despite the fact that last year the New York Post declared sardines to be the city’s new “it” food with “1 billion TikToks to prove it,” virtually no one I know enjoys them. My husband admits to being repulsed by them, and my son finds them equally horrifying, so we never eat them together at home; I usually indulge at a local tapas bar, where the portion, grilled and drizzled in lemon juice, is small enough I don’t feel obligated to share.

The exception to this, other than Eric Ripert (have I mentioned Eric Ripert?) is my friend Sarah, who owns a house with her husband on the coast of Portugal (not sure if the sardines are what lured them there or not) and who swims every day in an empty cove at the bottom of a steep hill. When my husband visited her husband there last fall, she made sure to steer him towards the best purveyor of the briney stuff so that he could bring me home however many tins of them customs would allow.

Going straight to the source

It’s really a mark of his besottedness that he buys me gifts that nauseate him when opened. And those ones cost less than what you’ll find at the Times Square pop-up store, where the tins start at $15 and go for as much $148. (The latter price has something to do with how lovingly they are cleaned by women factory workers in Portugal). Do I love sardines enough to pay $148 for them? No. But I love them enough to eat a tin of them with a glass of Vinho Verde when no one else is home. Here’s one extremely easy recipe worth trying if you, like me, love the epipelagic fish that swims just far enough below the sea’s surface that the sun barely kisses it.