Neighbourhoods
Alfama, Graça and the difference two streets make
Neighbourhoods here change character over very short distances, and the guidebook version is usually one street.
Helena Sá
Coffee writer, Coffee in Lisbon
Helena writes about coffee culture and can explain what to order without making it complicated.
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18 articles
Cafés & Coffee
Roast level is a decision about acidity, not about strength
What happens inside a bean between light and dark, and why the local default sits at the dark end.
Cafés & Coffee
Why the same beans taste different in two cafes
Identical coffee from the same roaster can land completely differently a hundred metres apart, and the reasons are mechanical.
Cafés & Coffee
Portuguese espresso is not a smaller Italian one
The local cup shares a machine with Italy and very little else, from the bean up.
Cafés & Coffee
Grind is the dial that moves everything else
Every other brewing variable is downstream of how finely the coffee was ground, and most home problems start here.
Neighbourhoods
What a street tells you before you order anything
The cafes on a block are a fairly honest census of who is on it, if you know what to look at.
Neighbourhoods
The lower grid and why it feels unlike the rest of the city
One district was rebuilt to a plan after catastrophe, and its right angles are an argument about how a city should work.
Cafés & Coffee
Arabica and robusta are two different plants with two different problems
The species split is agricultural before it is culinary, and it explains price, caffeine and why blends here taste the way they do.
Cafés & Coffee
The working day of a cafe, hour by hour
A neighbourhood cafe passes through four or five completely different businesses between opening and closing.
Cafés & Coffee
Crema tells you less than it looks like it does
The foam on an espresso is carbon dioxide in an emulsion, and reading it as a quality mark leads people astray.
Neighbourhoods
Where the tourist map stops
There is a fairly hard boundary around the visited city, and crossing it changes prices, language and the entire register of a…
Neighbourhoods
How an old apartment building actually works
The building types here have consistent logic, and knowing it explains light, noise, damp and where the good flats are.
Neighbourhoods
How sound moves in an old neighbourhood
Narrow streets, hard surfaces and open windows make the acoustics of these quarters unlike anywhere modern.
Cafés & Coffee
The espresso machine is a boiler with a queue problem
Almost everything that goes wrong in a busy cafe is a heat problem. Understanding how the machine stores and loses heat explains…
Cafés & Coffee
The milk ladder, from a stain to a full glass
Local milk coffees are not variations on a theme but points on a scale, and the scale is simply how much milk goes in. Knowing the…
Cafés & Coffee
Which rooms are built for sitting an hour
Some cafes are designed to move you through and some are designed to hold you. The furniture, the light and the counter depth tell…
Cafés & Coffee
What a cafe actually pays for, and why the cup stays cheap
The coffee itself is a small part of the cost of serving it. Rent, labour and habit set the price, which is why it barely moves…
Cafés & Coffee
How to tell a serious cafe from a merely busy one
Queues measure location, not quality. There are half a dozen visible habits that separate a place that cares about the cup from one…