Food and Wine Tours in Portugal

You sit down in a Portuguese restaurant and, before you order anything, a small plate arrives: bread, butter, olives, sometimes cheese or a paste of tuna or sardine. This is the couvert, and it is not free.

The rule is written down. Portuguese consumer law states that no dish, food product or drink, including the couvert, may be charged for if it was not requested by the customer or was not consumed by them. In practice that means you can wave it away when it arrives and pay nothing. What you cannot do is eat one olive and then argue.

This is not a scam and refusing it is entirely normal: waiters take the plate back without comment several times an evening. It is simply an opt-in that arrives looking like a gift, and knowing the rule turns an irritation into a choice.

Almost everything visitors find confusing about port comes from not knowing that three different places are involved.

The Douro, upriver, is where the grapes grow, on terraces cut into schist so steep that much of the work is still done by hand. The region was formally demarcated on 10 September 1756, which makes it the oldest demarcated and regulated wine region in the world. The landscape has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2001.

Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto, is where the wine was aged and shipped. And here is the fact that every tour guide tells you slightly wrong: the requirement to age port at Gaia was not a centuries-old tradition. It was created in 1926, when an entrepot was established and port could legally be stored there and nowhere else, and it was lifted in 1986, when direct sale from the Douro was authorised. Sixty years, not three hundred.

Porto itself sells and drinks it. The city gave the wine its name and, until 1986, did not legally hold it.

Port, Douro and Vinho Verde were all registered as protected designations of origin in December 1991. Queijo Serra da Estrela, the runny mountain cheese set with thistle rather than rennet, followed in 1996. The alheira of Mirandela, the smoked bread and poultry sausage, only got its protection in 2016, after two less famous alheiras had already been registered.

The pastel de nata has no protection at all. We checked the European register directly: it contains pastries from Tentúgal, Chaves and Torres Vedras, and nothing for the custard tart that half the world associates with Portugal. Pastéis de Belém is a trademark belonging to one bakery in Lisbon, not a designation, which is why the rest of the country sells nata and only that shop sells Belém.

The practical version: a good nata is judged by the pastry, not the custard. It should shatter, be visibly layered, and the top should be scorched almost black in places. Cinnamon is added by you, at the counter, and never in the kitchen.

Northern Portuguese food is heavier and more austere than the seafood cooking of the south, and three things carry it.

Bacalhau, salt cod, which is fished nowhere near here and has been the country's staple since the age of sail. It is soaked for a day or two before use and there is a standing joke about a recipe for every day of the year. In Porto it turns up baked with potatoes and olives, or shredded with egg and onion.

Francesinha, which is Porto's own: bread, steak, sausage, ham, covered in melted cheese and drowned in a hot beer and tomato sauce, with chips. The consensus in the Portuguese press attributes it to Daniel David da Silva at the restaurant A Regaleira in the early 1950s, though the year varies between tellings. It is enormous, it is not subtle, and it is the reason people book food tours here.

Tripas à moda do Porto, tripe with white beans, which gives the city's inhabitants their nickname, tripeiros. There is a well known story about it involving a siege in 1415 and the whole city donating its meat to the fleet, and it is worth knowing that Porto's own tourist authority publishes it under the heading Legend of the Tripeiros. Enjoy the story; do not repeat it as history.

The Douro is best from May to October, and the harvest runs through September, when the terraces are working and some estates limit visits. Winter in Porto is mild, wet and grey, and the river valley in January is beautiful and cold.

The date to know is the night of 23 to 24 June, São João, when the entire city goes into the street to eat grilled sardines, caldo verde and broa, and to hit each other on the head with plastic hammers. The hammers are recent: they appeared in the early 1960s and displaced the original object, which was a leek, and in 1970 traditionalists petitioned the council to ban them. They lost.

The other one is São Martinho, 11 November, for roast chestnuts and água-pé, the light wine made from the pressings.