Let's get the boring part out of the way: bread, steak, linguiça, fresh sausage, ham, cheese on top, all of it drowned in sauce. Fries. Optionally an egg, which is not optional.
The sauce is the whole thing. Beer, tomato, a chilli that means it, and a stock that somebody's grandmother would recognise. Every house has its own and every house is wrong except the one you grew up with. Mine is in Bonfim, has four tables, and would not survive a food blogger.
What it isn't: a burger. It isn't a croque-monsieur with ambition. It is not, whatever that place in Bairro Alto says, 'deconstructed'. A francesinha that arrives in pieces is a lunch that has been mugged.
I made one at the tasca last winter for staff meal. Rui said it was the best thing he'd eaten in Lisbon, which is a kind thing to say and also, technically, treason.
