The Best Fine Dining in Lisbon

Starred creative cooking with the best Portuguese produce, by chef José Avillez. There’s quite a few Michelin Star restaurants to choose from in Lisbon, if you’re looking for that kind of fine dining experience (thirteen restaurants, fifteen stars in total). Belcanto was the first to get two stars in the capital (and the only Portuguese restaurant on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list), and chef José Avillez continues to push the high standards with a cuisine that creatively expresses some of our best ingredients. From the “Scarlet shrimp curry, cauliflower and green apple” to the “Suckling pig with orange peel purée and lettuce” or the “Smoked and cured horse mackerel, Algarve carrot and emulsion”.If you go for lunch, the light comes in through the windows adding even more charm to the beautiful dining room.

I had the absolute pleasure of visiting 1 star restaurant, Feitoria, in Bélem, where beautiful and locally sourced products meets the talent and skills of the team. The meal was absolutely faultless, with an excellent selection of Portuguese wine. This deserved a better Michelin rating - it should have been at least 2 stars!

Old school is the best!Great restaurant. Old school Portuguese restaurant serving traditional fish and meat. Would recommend sitting at the bar, if space. Table side service is professional and seems like the waiters have worked here for 100 years.

Head Chef PEDRO PENA BASTOS and his team will spoil and surprise guests with a modern-natural cuisine.One MICHELIN starred restaurant CURA at FOUR SEASONS HOTEL RITZ in Lisbon, Portugal. It is a culinary journey through Portugal! All the dishes of our menu "ORIGIENS" were excellent! Chef PEDRO uses acidity, umami, bitter notes, saltiness and sweetness very skillfully. The dishes are full of flavors, textures and different temperatures! It’s a really superb dining experience! Our wine pairing was equally on par with the food. The service is very professional, attentive and charming! Guests can watch the chefs prepare the plates in the open kitchen! The interior is beautifully designed in 1960s style. The CURA offers a wonderful overall experience and is an absolute tip for Lisbon!

* Michelin Restaurant located in center of the capital city, Lisbon, has 16 and 18 course menus for a fair price.Inspired by the chef’s life, Ljubomir Stanisic, the tasting menu tells you some of the culture and life experiences of the Bosnian chef who has juguslav ancestry. The cocktail is all signatures and is a must to try.The front of house and service quality is outstanding.

Open horizonsI totally recommend this place to “omnivores”, amazing place, nice service and good wine menu.Makes you think how we can change in a near future to a different diet.

An “asador” style restaurant in Lisbon. All food served is cooked on the fire, including the coffee and the cocktails.If you love fire, wood and charcoal this is your place!

A beautiful trendy restaurant with fresh and unique Portuguese wine but mainly - with incredible dishes!While on a food trip it happens that we stumble upon great new discoveries, so this is what happened on our latest WBPtrip in Lisbon! Inês Matos Andrade is one of the most friendly food experts in Lisbon and she kept on insisting we visit this new place called ‘Oficio’, and wow! She was totally right!Oficio is a beautiful restaurant in the very heart of Lisbon! After several adventures in Europe’s leading restaurants, it was time for chef Hugo Candeias to head back to Lisbon to install his own style into its culinary landscape! Oficio would be his home base…A beautiful trendy restaurant with fresh and unique Portuguese wine but mainly with incredible dishes!Dehydrated pork skin and sea vegetable taco took the term ´starters’ to another level followed by some intense and unique creations!A ´veal and marrow tartare ´ rocked our senses, ´pork pillows in sea lettuce ´ had a very good symbiosis, ´pees with black pudding ´ is always a good combination and ´leek with roasted tomato and pumpkin seeds’ was served with perfection!The best dish was ‘cuttlefish in cuttlefish with cuttlefish ink’ a creation that brought me back to the shores of Lake Garda at Lido84! Perfection!Freshly ´fire-cooked skate with herbs’ and ‘old-fashioned oven rice with meats’ rounded off the mains! A terrific cheesecake with salt (why do we never add salt???) concluded this epic lunch!This chef has tons of talent!! A must do visit!

ALMA,Our turn to enter the world of chef Henrique Sá Pessoa in his two star Michelin restaurant Alma!What I loved about this place is that – despite its star status – the warm and traditional Portuguese feel has not been lost! Warm wooden tones, walls filled with bottles of wine and a fantastic team that created the best of hospitality…A series of snacks and amuses led the way of what would be an extraordinary evening starting with a tempura strip of red bell pepper coated in burnt leek powder and a red bell pepper dip, inspired by the traditional tempura green bean dish, peixinhos da horta! A beautiful dashi broth with cured fish and a fresh acidic ‘gazpacho’ rounded off these fine starters.One of the best dishes was soft and sweet glazed baby carrots served with sharp goat cheese, apricot, dried fruit, bulgar rice and cumin oil. The fact they serve a ‘simple’ dish in a star-studded restaurant like this explains the feeling I had with this restaurant! Elevating classic dishes to a true masterpiece of taste…Another example was the foie gras course which was an incredibly generous portion with apple, granola, coffee and beetroot. This was another unique mix of flavors and unlike any foie gras dish, I’ve been served before. A classic reinvented and one of the best foie dishes I have ever tasted… A perfect creation of Cod and lamb followed before another signature dish arrived, the suckling pig…. The way this suckling pig was created, really soft with an intense black pepper jus and the crispy crust was a showcase of artisanship in its purest form. A new dessert of sea flavors and citrus 2.0 was one of the best desserts I have ever had. A dessert that tastes of fresh nuances of the sea paired with the acidity of citrus was very atypical but totally amazing. All this showcases that Henrique Sá Pessoa is a man of great culinary talent. I love the way he takes traditional dishes and invents something really unique around them! The team conducts a close and personal approach which enhances the experience at Alma.

How to use 100% Portuguese products wisely.* Michelin Star Restaurant located in a beautiful part of Lisbon, the decor is beautiful and the food likewise, offers a tasting menu for a fair price and you have close experiences with the kitchen team and everything seems to be perfect synchronised.They have a mindset of using local, Portuguese products, specially from small producers.Interesting wine menu and selection.

Unique concept in a unique settingThe restaurant Ceia is situated in the magnificent, six-room Santa Clara 1728 Hotel in Lisbon. Chef Diogo Cateano's menu is inspired by the sea and the Portuguese landscape, and it is served at one large table where all fourteen diners sit together. The ingredients are of the highest quality and the cooking is creative, delicate, and delicious. The wine pairings were also great. It was a lot of fun as well as a unique concept in a unique setting.

Marlene Vieira is the only Portuguese woman chef competing for the podium at fine dining experiences in Portugal. It can be troublesome to be a strong woman in a conservative industry like the food one, especially in an old-fashioned and misogynist country such as Portugal. However, as the Portuguese say, "a woman from the north" is born with extra strength and the ability to fight. Marlene Vieira has that muscle, and earlier this year opened a gastronomic restaurant aiming for a Michelin Star. Marlene, – the restaurant's name is exactly like this, with a coma – is an elegant stage for this chef's work. At the centre of the restaurant, the ethereal kitchen illuminates like a holy altar, leaving the rest of the space in half-light. One can choose from two different tasting menus representing the story of her life and her experiences, but above all, challenging the status quo that other fine dining restaurants have been following. She does not approach produce and recipes with the well-behaved vibe most haute cuisine restaurants in Portugal do. Crawling between dishes, one can see she is knowledgeable, down-to-earth, ballsy, and above all things, connected to her roots. At the beginning of her path in this new project, I tasted a Goose Barnacles Tart with Codium and Planetree, a very polished snack. A comforting Spring dish made with Broad Beans, Morilles, and Sheep Butter, and a disruptive meat dish: Fatty Milky Lamb cooked on Live Coal and served with its Sweetbreads, Roasted Onions Purée, and Pickled Chard. Marlene Vieira is a pillar and an example for young women cooks out there, but one can not ignore she is not only standing next to the big boys but has overcome most of them.

Michelin-rated 100% vegetarian tasting menu in the heart of Lisbon.Encanto opened and won a Michelin star after only a few months, the expansive menu a drilled-in study of the pulled, picked, plucked and foraged: legumes, leaves, seeds, algae, mushrooms, flowers, fruits, nuts, eggs, cheeses and so on and so on, “driving to contribute to a more sustainable world,” says chef José Avillez. Sourcing ingredients from small or local Portuguese farmers, Encanto puts the culinary spotlight on seasonal produce from a drive to contribute to a more sustainable world. Some dish examples include: confit egg yolk, Jerusalem artichoke, bean broth, truffle cabbage, onion corn kernels, Azorean Island cheese.

Portuguese traditional food and old-school service, Belmiro is a local favourite, tucked in a charming street.Belmiro de Jesus has a legion of fans from a time when families used to come out all dressed up on Sundays to hit the old traditional restaurants, the type of places that are a step up from rustic tascas, with white cotton tablecloths and gentlemen's service.He is known in the city for his work at A Charcutaria – now closed – Adega Tia Matilde – one of the oldest restaurants in town – and the infamous institution Salsa & Coentros. A few years back, Belmiro opened his restaurant to focus on one specific delight he was famous for, empadas, the savoury, mouth-watering meat pies. Later, he moved to a bigger place in a very charming street near Campo Mártires da Pátria garden, with a small terrace al fresco and a menu full of classic Portuguese recipes made the old-school way but nicely presented to please the more conservative diners. The set of small starters impresses – a pair of small chicken empadas made with a thin pastry that shames all the empadas in town. The secret, the experts say, is adding lard to the dough. The poultry liver patê is also balanced and indulgent, but make sure never, never, never to miss the Migas the Batatas com Ovos, a dish Belmiro created and that one can only find here or at Salsa & Coentros because of the legacy he left behind. It may appear simple, but this dish, made with scrambled eggs and potatoes, is a creamy gift from heaven that keeps on giving each time we taste it.Moving on. Portuguese cuisine is much more than Pastel de Nata and Codfish; it's the result of poverty and hunger, filled with people that used to cook with few ingredients in a nose-to-tail approach. Besides the best Portuguese cheese and cold meats range, Belmiro oversees his cooks doing quintessential recipes, such as the Codfish Sames with Beans, the mandatory Cabidela – a Portuguese chicken blood rice – Veal Cheeks Stew, or Veal Feet Stew with Chickpeas; amongst several game pot dishes, such as the Hare Rice.

A place to discover the best Portuguese ingredients cooked in a sophisticated, yet simple, way and full of flavour.The restaurant of the beautiful Bairro Alto Hotel has one of the best views over the rooftops of downtown Lisbon. The project started with Nuno Mendes who came from London to create all the food concepts in the hotel (check also the more recent 18.68 Cocktail Bar). Now that Nuno left, talented chef Bruno Rocha continues the work they started together. Try the amazing barnacles toast to start and, if in winter, don't miss the mushrooms with cured egg before discovering the delicate texture of the sea bass, at its very best also in winter, when the fat of the fish melts in your mouth. For dessert, the soft and not very sweet farófias are a must. Also, go for the wine pairing and you will learn a lot about less well known Portuguese wines from small, independent producers, many of them organic or biodynamic.

Best Couple/Team in town.Located in Lisbon, one of the best meals I've ever had, a project of a young couple who both serve and cook in front of you, with a communal table where you can meet new people in that evening. Amazing welcoming and amazing atmosphere, needless to say, how good the food was. In terms of the wine pairing, it was fun that they serve wines that they tried during past experiences, in their personal or professional lives.A must in Lisbon.Price quality to good to be true.

Great food and wines, in a creative contemporary Portuguese cooking. Chef João Sá has is very own approach Tasting menu and pairing or let yourself in the chef's handsReally good local wine selection focused on Lisbon’s reagion.