Honest Bao

Fine dining is a joy Beautiful plating, clever cooking, ingredients that actually taste of something. It's also the fastest way to empty a bank account. So on my Porto trip I went hunting for the sweet spot: proper fine-dining polish at a price that doesn't require a small loan. Two places delivered. Gruta   It is the one everyone talks about — an all-women team tucked down a plant-lined ramp on Rua de Santa Catarina, with a menu that's genuinely thoughtful and plating that belongs on a magazine cover.  The oysters were the highlight: fresh, clean, properly tasty. The scallop was a near-miss — a touch small, and the sauce was so sharp it bulldozed a scallop that wasn't hugely flavourful to begin with. Enhance, don't overpower!  The fish was fine, nothing to write home about, though the rice alongside was made for mopping up sauce. The chocolate dessert with ice cream? That one landed.  Portions run small, and our server was new — lovely, but couldn't talk me th...

Mercado do Bolhão  lands on just about every "must visit in Porto" list, so of course I paid it a visit as a first-timer. And the building genuinely deserves the hype. The market's story starts back in 1839, when the city council turned a meadow with a bubbling stream — bolhão means "big bubble" — into a square of wooden stalls. The grand neoclassical hall you see today came later, built in 1914 to a design by architect Correia da Silva, mixing granite, reinforced concrete and metalwork around an open central courtyard. It's been a protected monument of public interest since 2013. Nice historic building After a four-year restoration, it reopened on 15 September 2022 — beautifully kept and full of character, with the original bones intact and the stalls now clean, bright and modernised (there's even direct metro access). As architecture and atmosphere, it's a winner. Spread across 2 levels, food are mainly in the lower level 🧭 The layout   It's ...