I visited the viral tinned fish store in NYC's Times Square that sells $19.60 cans of tuna and $44 hand-deboned sardines with edible gold flakes

I saw lots of passersby do a double take at the store's window display and peek inside.

Joana Quaresma, the store's project manager, told me that for her the store is about bringing a cultural staple to an American audience and putting Portugal on the map.

"We decided to create this fantasy around the sardine because it's a very important product for us — the Portuguese," Quaresma said. "It's one of the best things that our country has to offer, and we want to make sure that we're giving it the special attention it deserves."

The decorative ironwork in the store was all made in Portugal by Portuguese craftspeople and then shipped to the US ahead of the store's opening, Quaresma told me. Even the books at the top of the shelves were shipped from Portugal.

Circus-y marching band music plays through speakers, including "Stars and Stripes Forever," the official national march of the US. A wall plaque in the shop talks about the music choice, and notes that the march's composer, John Philip Sousa, was of Portuguese descent.

Many of the tins are on the pricier side. A can of tuna costs $19.60, as do all of the sardines with flavors like lemon, peppers, or tomato. Smoked salmon costs $29.30, marinated eels cost $32.30, and a can of sea bass is $32.40. There are only two items that cost under $15: regular sardines — not the small sardines, timeless sardines, skinless and boneless sardines, or any of the flavored sardines — and the Jack Mackerel.

The cans are designed to look like gold ingots, and the sardines inside are packed with edible gold flakes. They're also individually deboned and deskinned by hand, a meticulous process — each can takes about 15 minutes to prepare by hand, Quaresma says.

"We wanted to kind of elevate the sardine the maximum we could," she said. "The way to do that was to actually make it gold, to actually make it a treasure."

Regular skinless and boneless sardines — no gold flakes — cost $30.

Some of the cans are decorated with art inspired by certain Portuguese traditions, while others take inspiration from comic books and Pop art.

The store's "Timeless Sardines" collection has cans stamped with every year going back to 1916, meant as a marketing gimmick so customers can buy cans as gifts to commemorate a birth year, anniversary, or other dates of significance. Each can also includes a historical fun fact from the year it carries or denotes the birth of a celebrity.

I met one customer in the store — Andie Fuentes, 25 — who told me that she found the store on TikTok and came in to buy the "Timeless" sardines as gifts for her Portuguese boyfriend.

"His birthday is coming up and I thought it would be cool — since he likes sardines a lot — to do personalized cans based big stuff like the year he was born, the year he graduated high school," Fuentes said.

No need to worry about eating hundred-year-old sardines, though. All fish were canned recently, regardless of the year on the can.

There's a can for each of the cities where the company has a store — this includes Lisbon, Porto, and Madeira.

The store first opened selling just sardines, but soon expanded its offerings to include other seafood like octopus, which Quaresma said has been a bestseller. Though there are plenty of recipes for how to cook with tinned seafood, I opted to just buy a loaf of bread to eat the seafood with.

I'm absolutely not a tinned fish connoisseur and admittedly don't have a huge sardine data pool to compare these to, but I thought they tasted fresher and less fishy than other grocery store sardines I've had in the past. I liked the taste of the olive oil they were packed with, which I soaked up with more bread.

There were about 10 tentacle pieces packed in the can, each about an inch in diameter. It was tender and not at all chewy, like good fresh octopus is, and had a bit of brininess. Having octopus at home was fun and kind of novel, since it's one of those things that I'm unlikely to ever attempt to cook myself, but at $29.80 per can I can't say I'll make this a regular thing. I think I'd rather stick to ordering it at a restaurant.

Quaresma has lived in Portugal her whole life, but moved to New York ahead of the store's opening to oversee the process and operations. I told her I thought she must be very passionate about tinned fish to change countries for it.

"Once you understand the importance of the product and the value there is behind it, there's no way to not be passionate about it," she replied. "I think that the trend is the universe saying, 'I think you're doing the right thing.' And we're very happy about it."

Though the prices are probably too high for me to add the Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine as a stop for my grocery list, I do think that the existence of a magical fantasy sardine library in the middle of Times Square is something special, and I could imagine going back.

Plus, I found my birth year sardine and learned that I was born roughly 100 years after Enzo Ferrari was. What more could I ask for?