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The main feeling you get when having dinner in the lush backyard of Lunas, Jose and Basia Silva’s contemporary Portuguese restaurant on a corner in Petersham, is the bonhomie of sharing food like a family.

“My dream is to create what it’s like when I go back to Portugal to my aunty’s backyard,” Jose Silva says. “There are vines all around and you sit there in the courtyard just eating nice food and enjoying each other’s company.

“When a big roast is made or a big seafood stew, the pot goes in the middle of the table and everyone serves themselves. It’s what I grew up with.”

This is one reason why Lunas’ tables, set in an alfresco courtyard or inside between wide windows, forest green walls and a corrugated metal-fronted counter, are bigger than those in most restaurants.

“When I eat, I like to have a few dishes on the table at the same time,” Silva says. “The idea is to share the food, get a couple of dishes, bread, olives, some drinks, and you all pick at it. You can’t do that with small tables.”

Test this theory by ordering several dishes, hopefully Alto olives from Crookwell, marinated with rosemary and lemon and orange zest, “Grandma’s” bread (fluffy and soft due to 80 per cent water content), octopus rice, smoked bacalhau (dried, salted cod) pâte with poppy seed lavosh, ling and clam cataplana and a side of garlicky pan-charred kale cooked with brown butter and lager.

Even with the paraphernalia of cutlery, napkins, drinking glasses and water bottle, there is still enough room amid the serving dishes and plates on the table for any diner to complete a spirited card game or produce an atlas to read between courses.

You can do this inside, in the handsome dining space designed by Basia Silva. But, as summer creeps into the evenings, the Silvas’ rejuvenated backyard area, a covered courtyard edged by grass, olive trees, native shrubs, herb bushes and curling vines, is the place to be.

Few things are as lovely as eating one of Lunas’ signature dishes – specifically the piri piri spatchcock with tangy red cabbage, red onion and preserved lemon, or the roasted sugarloaf cabbage, served with cannellini beans and cavolo nero – as cicadas buzz high in the surrounding gum trees at dusk.

Tonight, as nearby diners receive their spectacular flambe chourico – a dish of three-week-aged La Boqueria cured sausage is set alight on arrival – we sweep crunchy paperbark-like lavosh through creamy, uniquely umami smoked bacalhau pâte.

Then, the lush octopus rice, with fat Fremantle octopus and fragrant caldeirada (fish stew) and the marvellous ling and clam cataplana, served in its clam-shell-like copper pressure cooker.

Dessert is shared pudim de leite, its silkiness coming from condensed milk, beneath an orangey caramel deglazed with port, and bolo de bolacha, or biscuit cake, a dish Silva describes as a dish your mother or aunt would make.

“Every Portuguese birthday party will have one,” he says. “It’s like a Portuguese tiramisu. Amazing with coffee, too.”

Lunas has good strong coffee, and tea, however late you dine. There are also six Portuguese wines amid Australian and Italian varieties, and five cocktails including a ruby port Portuguese negroni and a cachaca Collins made with Portuguese soft drink passionfruit Sumol.

Everything is also very well priced.

Discussing any dish with Silva, whose family members in Australia and Portugal include professional chefs and food-loving relatives, leads to him sharing the recipe.

He relishes the infinite ways to cook bacalhau, the beauty of a ham-and-cheese toastie and the opportunity to share his version of caldo verde, a potato, kale and chorizo soup with origins in northern Portugal, his home territory. “That’s the whole idea here,” he says.

“I don’t hold back with recipes. I love sharing them.”

Silva, who grew up in Stanmore and also runs custard tart temple Sweet Belem and Fich restaurant down the road with Basia, wants everyone to experience the delights of Portuguese cooking.

“I think it is getting more acknowledgment for what it is,” he says.

“People are travelling more to Portugal, they’re starting to see what Portuguese food is about.

“It’s beautiful ingredients, it’s hearty, it’s family. And it’s all about sharing.”