Offbeat Eats

During our March trip to Montreal, prior to our outing to the 2026 Pied de Cochon Cabane à Sucre, several of us arrived two evenings before the event, and decided to go out for a light dinner. Since our hotel (our long standby Hôtel Château de l’Argoat) is in Montreal’s Le Village area, we decided to explore more of Rue Ontario Est’s restaurants. After looking in the window and seeing a rather impressive set of grilled chickens, we decided that Sardine Rose, a small Portuguese restaurant, was just the ticket.

Our last dinner in Lisbon was at a place scoped out by my sister-in-law: A Conzinha Sr. Lisboa. Located a block east of Avenida da Liberdade, A Conzinha Sr. Lisboa (The name means, approximately, “The Kitchen of Mr Lisbon”, the nickname of the executive chef), this was a great choice for a final meal in Portugal, since the menu focuses entirely on traditional Portuguese recipes made with modern, local ingredients.

After a morning of checking out churches and panoramic views (and an aborted attempt at Castelo São Jorge due to unusually heavy crowds), we decided it would be good to seek out a light lunch, and this was a perfect opportunity to drop down into the Baixa and check out one of it’s venerable institutions, Restaurante Nova Pombalina.

After we finished with our coastal hike, we eventually needed to get back to Lisbon for our return trips. Instead of heading back through Porto (which all of us had previously experienced), we decided that we’d take a minor diversion to check out another of Portugal’s major cities: Coimbra. Home to Portugal’s primary university, Coimbra is an old town on a hillside that, in a country known for steep cities, is particularly steep, and fun to explore. Another advantage of Portugal is that it has quite a few high-end (and particularly Michelin-starred) restaurants that are still relatively affordable, and a few of the better-reviewed places in Portugal are located in Coimbra. We ended up taking our first evening in Coimbra to visit O Palco (“the stage”). While they haven’t yet received a star, they have some top-of-class cuisine, with an elaborate 12-course meal.

Before departing on our coastal hike, we had a Saturday evening in Porto to do some light sightseeing and revisit some favorite sites. We had pretty thoroughly explored Porto in 2018, and one of the areas we liked visiting was the sister city of Vila Nova de Gaia on the other side of the Douro river, and after walking the waterfront and enjoying a Porto Tonico at one of the sidewalk cafés, it was time to consider dinner. Much of the time Porto is the quieter, more laid back city compared to Lisbon, but that doesn’t generally apply to weekends: Porto’s waterfront is absolutely hopping on the warmer weekends of the year, so it was important for us to find a place where we could get reservations, hopefully for some good Portuguese food to start to get us calibrated for our walk. After consulting The Fork (which seems to get more support in Europe than OpenTable), we booked a table at DeCastro Novo de Gaia.

After our day of exploration in Lisbon, our next stop was Porto, to rendezvous with my brother and sister-in-law to start our hike. Taking the very excellent Alfa Pendular high-speed train, after a comfortable journey we soon found ourselves arriving at Porto Campanha station. From there to our hotel down by the Douro Waterfront is a relatively short walk, so we decided to use this as an opportunity to do one of Offbeat Eats Health Check re-visits to a favorite spot from our 2018 trip, Casa Guedes.

Our main vacation this year was a two-week trip to Portugal, centering on a hike from Povoa de Varzim to Caminha along the Caminho Português da Costa. While our previous trip to Portugal was staged through Porto, between cheaper fares and sitting on a giant American Airlines credit from some weather-related delays back in March, we ended up booking through Lisbon and then taking the train over to Porto the next day to rendezvous with my brother and sister-in-law. This gave us a nice day of air travel recovery while exploring some of the lesser-traveled parts of Lisbon, including the excellent aquarium. Lisbon is a very popular and crowded tourist destination these days, so when it came time for dinner, I decided this would be a good opportunity to eschew the more popular parts of Lisbon (Alfama, Baixa, and Chiado), so I found a nice little family restaurant in the Lapa district west of downtown, Restaurante Raizes.

As I mentioned in my review of Café Santiago, Porto loves its sandwiches, and pretty much any Porto tourism or dining guide will recommend that you find one of several joints and try out a Francesinha. But Porto doesn’t just limit itself to the Francesinha; the pork products (both fresh and cured) of Portugal, and their love of fresh Portuguese-style rools (papo secos) make for a lot of great sandwich possibilities, so all sorts of other cafés around Porto offer up their take on the “sande” (sandwich). And if there’s any place that’s almost guaranteed to be on most any recommendation list alongside a Francesinha, that’s going to Casa Guedes for a Sande de Pernil.

After a morning of wandering around Porto, including some spectacular sightseeing from the Torre dos Clérigos, we were ready for a light lunch. This lead us to the nearby Universidade do Porto district, which has a nice selection of small cafés and bars that cater to the students of the University. It’s an interesting part of town to hang around, since Portuguese universities have a strong set of traditions (called “Praxe”), part of which is still maintaining an academic wardrobe. So several of the places by the University have a lot of students roaming about in their distinctive black cloaks and dresses. In a jokingly referential manner, one of the cafés in the neighborhood, Café Piolho, is named after these students (the name mean “louse”, so they literally are saying the café is infested).

Compared to the rest of the Douro, which generally is quite calm and free of a lot of tourist traffic, Pinhão is the epicenter of activity in the Alto Douro; almost every day there’s at least one river cruise ship coming or going (day trips from Porto are popular, as are cruises headed further up the Douro to Spain), and it’s also the largest concentration of both hotels and restuarants (although the Douro valley still seems to be catching up with tourism; most Quintas having to implement reservations, and several places having recently added accommodations). Enjoying the sunset After completing a tour and a very enjoyable port tasting at Quinta do Bomfim, and eyeing the bountiful picnic baskets that some other guests had reserved there (we’d come back and do that later in our trip), we were actually getting a bit hungry, so as the sun started to set we were looking around Pinhão’s harbor for dinner. The first place we looked for, Bar Restaurante Veladouro, apparently was temporarily closed (they were open the next weekend when we returned to Pinhão), so we ended up at the place next door, Restaurant LBV 79 (run by the same people running the LBV Guesthouse that we were staying at up the hill… if you are wondering about the name, LBV is short for “Late Bottle Vintage”, a regular Port wine term).