Enjoy fresh-baked pastries and more at Natas in Sherman Oaks

The number or Portuguese restaurants in Southern California can be counted on just a couple of fingers on one hand.

Far as I can tell, there’s the newish Portuguese/Cal Cuisine concept called Caldo Verde in the Proper Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. And even more notably, there’s Natas Pastries, a Portuguese café and restaurant in Sherman Oaks, which has been around since 2005, making it downright prehistoric in local terms. And for all that time, it’s been semi-hidden in an easy-to-miss space next to Casa Vega, which is where I take visitors from out of town. I like to keep Natas a special treat for me.

It was born, as the website tells us, when Lisbon native Fatima Marques went searching for her beloved pastéis de nata. Unable to find this addictive crème brûlée custard in a puff pastry shell anywhere, she decided to make her own. And on June 10 of that year, she opened Natas Pastries, which five years later became a full-service sit-down restaurant.

It’s still dominated by pastries; several dozen are listed on the menu, including half a dozen Portuguese empanadas. What Willy Wonka is to chocolate, Fatima Marques is to natas — a word that refers to the cream filling that dominates many of her sweets. And, of course, a warm weekend afternoon spent on the outdoor patio at Natas can easily be occupied with a meal of pastries, and a tasty cappuccino. But then, you’d be missing one of the most extensive Portuguese menus this side of Lisbon, a land where feijoada rules. And bacalhau raises your sodium level in a very tasty way.

Portugal has been in, at least, my consciousness for a while now. A recent front-page newspaper story detailed the flood of Americans who have opted to leave the US of A for Lisbon, Porto and any number of smaller cities along the Portuguese coast, as a destination where they could escape…well, pretty much everything. The lifestyle is quiet, the prices lower, the shootings nonexistent. It reminds me of the way locals were moving to Costa Rica a decade ago. At least, they were till crime against expats became epidemic.

And this Portuguese exodus really came into focus when a neighbor announced they were going there for a month to look for property. They reported the expat community was filled with true believers, who believed they had found paradise with an incomprehensible language. (My neighbors returned with a down payment made on a property in a small town, where one of them, a musician, planned to study the local guitar style called fado.)