I was in Lisbon, struggling with my selfie stick in front of the magnificent Santa Justa Lift, trying to capture the perfect shot of the neo-Gothic ironwork against the city’s red rooftops. Just as I was about to give up, a friendly man approached me. “Need a hand with that?” he asked with a warm smile. He introduced himself as a local CNN reporter.

After he snapped a few photos of me with the Santa Justa Lift in the background, the conversation turned, as it always does in Portugal, to food. He told me this: “You have not truly eaten in Lisbon until you have been to Pastéis de Belém,” he declared with the certainty of a local who knows the city’s best-kept secrets. “It is not just a pastry shop; it’s the birthplace of the pastel de nata. You must go.”