Food Tours · Tour

Nine Portions, Five Drinks, and the Alheira Story

At least nine food portions and five drinks across three and a half hours, with ten people at most. The operator's stated aim is to get past the clichés, and the count is how it does that: nine plates is enough to include the things a shorter tour has to leave out. You meet at the entrance to the Clérigos tower, by the small staircase, and the route works through tascas, the small family-run taverns where petiscos are what the kitchen has rather than what the menu says. One of the plates is alheira, and its history is the reason it exists. When Portugal expelled or forcibly converted its Jewish population, families who stayed were watched for whether they hung pork sausages to cure like everyone else. The alheira was the answer: a sausage of bread, garlic and poultry or game, hung in the same way, indistinguishable from outside. It is now eaten by everyone and nobody thinks about why. The Bolhão market provides a tasting paired with Portuguese wine, and there is canned fish, a bifana, and the rest changes with what is good. Coffee or tea comes with it. It ends on Santa Catarina with dessert, which the operator considers the only correct way to finish. The guide talks through where each dish comes from and what it says about the north, along with Porto's own history. Up to ten travellers, in English, moderate walking, comfortable shoes. Minimum drinking age eighteen. There is no vegetarian version of this one.