My partner’s sister visited us in Lisbon for about a week, so we booked an overnight trip to Porto by train. Though my partner and I had visited (day trip from Lisbon, do not do this) before we moved to Portugal, and I had been once decades ago, this was our first visit to the city since we moved. We really need to go more often. As in Lisbon, the historic centre is heaving with tourists, but things thin out as soon as one moves away from it.
We arrived at the Campanha train station a little before 1pm on a Friday, and could not check into our Airbnb (in Bonfim, about a kilometre west) until 3, so it made sense to go to lunch. A Cozinha do Manel was on the way, mentioned in Time Out (unlike for Lisboa, the English and Portuguese versions of Time Out for Porto are pretty close in their offerings). We were travelling light, just daypacks, so dropped in. They could not offer us a table, but said we could sit at the bar, same menu and service. Fine with us.
The wall behind us was covered with photos of celebrities who had eaten there. My partner identified one major politician but none of the recent contestants on Portuguese Taskmaster were there, it seems.
We had to order one main each, no half-portions (the people seated beside us tried in Portuguese and could not manage it either). This was way too much food so we did not touch the couvert or have dessert. But the food was good.
We have had many versions of bacalhau à Brás, as it is one of my favourites, and I have prepared it for family in North America, and since arriving here. This may be one of the best, if not the best, I have had in a restaurant. My partner historically did not care for salt cod or olives, but she is coming around, and both she and I ordered this dish, so the serving came together. The eggs were not too runny but not too dry; the potato sticks were not too soggy but not too crisp; the cod had the right texture and the right amount of residual salt. Black olives in Portugal are much better than the Californian ones that dominate in North America, but I still prefer non-black in this dish.
Our visitor ordered rojoẽs de porco. In the south, this refers to cubes of pork perhaps 2cm on a side, but in the north, it means various cuts of pork, including offal. She proclaimed it excellent, but stuck to the more mainstream cuts, until she started to flag and I took a bite of the blood (to the right), at which point she had some and liked it. I asked the server if it was morcela (morcilla in Spanish, blood sausage) and she said, no, it was just blood, boiled, with cumin, no onions or other spices. I also took the piece of liver. “Oh, you like liver?” said our visitor, and I looked at her and said deadpan, “You know what they say… there must be fifty ways to love your liver.” She complimented me on that, but the real compliment was that our server of a certain age, hovering nearby, turned away and cracked up.
We couldn’t finish either dish, but we made a serious dent in them, at least. With this, we had a carafe of a half-litre of the house white, and I appreciated that they put it in an ice bucket. If there is a house wine in a Portuguese restaurant, it is almost always worth ordering. It may come out of a five-litre box of wine-in-a-bag, but it will be fine.
We moved to Portugal because my partner’s employer had their European HQ in Lisbon. She is no longer with that company, but one of her team lives in Porto. We contacted her and she suggested a few places. Among them was Adega Saõ Nicolau, which with its partner Taberna dos Mercadores is in most of the usual references. It’s a bit back from the waterfront but very close to the Ribeira which is the heart of the tourist zone, and reservations are only by phone. Having a Portuguese speaker make the reservations tipped it for me.
Here is the view from the exterior terrace, which has a few tables that one cannot book, but one can line up for, and that is what the tourists mostly do. The interior is quite nice, with a cylindrical ceiling lined with wood, reminiscent of both a wine barrel and a ship’s keel. (I don’t have a good photo of this, but there are plenty online.) I took the bad interior snap sitting in my chair at the table.
Since we’d had such a large lunch, we were not that hungry (we had an early reservation, at 7pm). The octopus salad is supposed to be good here, but we also were intrigued by the arroz de mariscos (seafood rice), a portion for two people at 42€. We were four, but we asked the waiter, and to his credit, he said it would be fine. Our visitor ordered a mixed salad also, and along with a bottle of Douro white, that was our main dinner, and it was plenty.
What I appreciated: while my partner’s colleague spoke to the server in Portuguese, I could follow, and it was nothing out of the ordinary; he addressed us all in English, with a similar manner, very friendly and helpful; we were not rushed in any way, even though the initial seating (mostly tourists of various European flavours, it seemed) emptied out and new people were seated, around 9pm. For a place in this tourist-infested location to be that casual, and thinking nothing about four people sharing a dish for two, even recommending it, that is commendable.
Our host ordered us a dessert on the menu, seminaristas, a light crisp layered pastry, not too sweet, no eggs, 4,5€ for four, just right. She also recommended a market the next day, the Senhora da Hora Fair, most of the way on the Metro out to the suburb of Matosinhos in the northeast where she lived, and in particular a stall that specialized in used designer clothes. We went there the next day, and while there were many clothing stalls (as well as vegetables and fruits and other specialities) we found the one she had described, and our visitor scored some serious bargains. We continued on to a lunch place in Matosinhos, within walking distance of a serious beach. This was Meia-Nau, listed in Time Out for their location in Porto (they also have one in the Time Out market in Porto, which raised my suspicions, as the Time Out markets are serious tourist traps, but we did fine at the Matosinhos location. I made a reservation online.
We ordered sardinhas (13€), which are in season, and octopus rice with its fillets (48€, for two people), a common menu item in this area, for our visitor who had not had octopus before we took her to Bistrô Crioulo in Lisboa and was quite impressed by it.
The food was really good, as was the wine. Vinho Verde is both a style and an appellation. The style is slightly fizzy, somewhat sweet, and low in alcohol, but the appellation is broader, and often includes the Alvarinho grape (Albariño in Spain). This was dry and of a typical ABV for a Portuguese white.
One person showed up and was offered a table outside for 90 minutes (you can see him in the lower right of the leftmost window in the shot above) but everyone who showed up after that without a reservation was turned away.
We only managed to eat about half the food, but since we were checked out of our Airbnb and headed back to Lisbon later in the afternoon, we took it in containers to go, and had it for lunch the next day. We did finish the wine, though.
One more thing worth reporting: a couple of blocks from our Airbnb was a Michelin-starred restaurant, Euskalduna, which we didn’t go to. But they have an associated bakery a few doors down, called Ogi, and we went there for our breakfast pastries. It is not easy to find good pastries (by French standards) in Portugal, and these were quite good. The guy running the place is quite a character, apt to break into song. Coffee (at a different place) was not so successful, I will not bother you with details. (We bought a loaf of their sourdough and took it back to Lisbon for subsequent lunches; it was pretty good, though I prefer Gleba in Lisbon, even though it is not as spectacular now as when I first had it in 2019.)
