Cafés & Coffee
How to order coffee in Lisbon without overthinking it
The vocabulary is small, the coffee is cheap, and standing at the counter costs less than sitting down.
Inês Carvalho
Editor, Coffee in Lisbon
Inês edits Coffee in Lisbon and has lived in three of its neighbourhoods, none of them the fashionable one.
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54 articles
Practicalities
The hills are the transport system
Lisbon is built on slopes, and understanding the vertical layer changes how you move around it.
Day Trips
Sintra in a day, done properly
The day trip everyone takes, and the one most commonly ruined by trying to see everything.
Practicalities
What catches visitors out
A short list of practical things that are obvious to residents and consistently surprise everyone else.
Practicalities
The tourist tram, and what to ride instead
One route is famous, crowded and pickpocketed. Several others do the same thing better.
Living There
Staying longer: the admin nobody warns you about
Beyond a few weeks the city becomes a place with paperwork, and the paperwork has its own rhythm.
Day Trips
Day trips by train that are not Sintra
The regional network reaches several towns that are quieter, cheaper and genuinely different.
Cafés & Coffee
What steaming actually does to milk
The texture in a good milk coffee is protein and air held in a fat structure, and there are precise ways to ruin it.
Cafés & Coffee
Espresso and filter are two answers to the same bean
Pressure, ratio and contact time separate them, and the split explains why a cafe good at one may be indifferent at the other.
Cafés & Coffee
How coffee goes stale, and what actually slows it down
Oxygen and time do the damage, and most domestic storage advice makes one of them worse.
Cafés & Coffee
The four ways caffeine gets taken out of a bean
Decaf is a manufacturing process applied before roasting, and the process used explains most of the difference in the cup.
Cafés & Coffee
Counter, table, terrace: the three prices for one coffee
The same cup can cost noticeably different amounts within four metres, and the system is posted rather than hidden.
Eating
The savoury counter and how to use it
Fried and baked snacks are the local answer to being hungry between meals, and their quality depends almost entirely on timing.
Day Trips
Market day towns and the weekly rhythm
Towns around the region hold markets on fixed weekdays, and arriving on the right morning changes what the place is.
Eating
Wine by the glass, at lunch, without ceremony
A glass of wine with a weekday meal is ordinary here, and the house option is usually the sensible order.
Day Trips
Beach towns out of season
The coastal towns in winter are quiet, cheap and dramatic, and about a third of them are effectively shut.
Practicalities
Cafe etiquette from the door to the pavement
The customs are few and mostly unspoken, and getting them right takes about a day.
Living There
The tourism argument, without picking a side
Lisbon has a real and unresolved tension about visitors, and understanding it is more useful than feeling guilty about it.
Living There
Housing pressure, explained mechanically
Rents in the city rose fast for several connected reasons, and knowing which are local helps you read the argument.
Living There
Becoming a regular, and why it takes three weeks
The neighbourhood cafe rewards repetition rather than friendliness, and the shift when it happens is unmistakable.
Living There
Winter indoors: damp, cold and the standard responses
The most common complaint from people who move here is about being cold in a warm country, and the reasons are structural.
Living There
August, and the city that leaves
The month everyone visits is the month residents go somewhere else, and the city runs on a skeleton of itself.
Living There
Learning Portuguese past the ordering stage
The gap between café vocabulary and actual conversation is large, and the pronunciation is what makes it large.
Living There
Making coffee at home in a Portuguese kitchen
The equipment, the water and the beans available locally push you toward some methods and away from others.
Living There
The supermarket coffee aisle, decoded
A wall of vacuum bricks and capsules follows a logic, and almost none of it is about origin.
Living There
The shape of a residential week
Once you stop sightseeing, the city runs on a weekly rhythm that is easy to miss and useful to know.
Living There
Why friendships here take a year, not a fortnight
Social warmth is immediate and social integration is slow, and confusing the two is the standard newcomer disappointment.
Living There
Old shops, heritage listing and what protection actually does
The city has a scheme for protecting historic shops, and its limits explain why some of them still close.
Neighbourhoods
Mouraria, and how one hill became the most mixed part of the city
A steep tangle behind the castle hill that has absorbed newcomers for centuries and is doing it again. It is also where the tourist…
Neighbourhoods
Belem is a monument district, not a neighbourhood
It reads as a place to live on a map and behaves like an open-air exhibition on the ground. Knowing which one you are visiting…
Neighbourhoods
Why a neighbourhood ends at a viaduct
Big roads and rail lines do not just take up space, they cut journeys. The effect on the streets either side is measurable and…
Neighbourhoods
The ground floors tell you where a street is going
Shopfronts are the leading indicator of neighbourhood change. Read them and you can tell who a street currently serves and who it…
Cafés & Coffee
Water is the ingredient nobody adjusts
A cup of coffee is overwhelmingly water, and the minerals in that water decide how much of the bean ever makes it out. Most cafes…
Cafés & Coffee
Why the traditional cup is a blend rather than a single origin
Blending is not a way of hiding cheap coffee. It is how a roaster makes the same cup available every week of the year, which is…
Cafés & Coffee
How a cup cools, and why the last sip tastes different
Temperature changes which flavours you can perceive, and a small cup loses heat fast. That is why the local habit is to drink it…
Eating
Grilled sardines belong to a few weeks, not to the year
The fish is fattest in high summer and thin the rest of the time, which is why the smell of charcoal is seasonal and why the…
Eating
The dish of the day is the best structure on the menu
One dish, cooked in volume, sold at lunch and gone by mid afternoon. It is the freshest thing the kitchen makes and the cheapest…
Eating
Fish sold by weight, and how that bill is built
Whole fish and shellfish are priced per kilo rather than per plate. The number on the menu is not what you will pay, and knowing…
Day Trips
Across the water: the south bank as a day out
Ten minutes of river separates the city from a different set of towns, beaches and cliffs. It is the closest thing to leaving…
Day Trips
The walled towns, and what an hour inside the gate is for
A ring of medieval walls concentrates everything into a few lanes, which is why these towns fill up so fast and empty so completely…
Day Trips
A headland at the edge of a continent, and why it is always cold there
The westernmost point of mainland Europe is a cliff, a lighthouse and a great deal of wind. The wind is the whole story of the…
Practicalities
The lifts and funiculars are public transport, not rides
The vertical machines in the city exist because the hills do. Treating them as attractions rather than as infrastructure is what…
Practicalities
Walking downhill is the part that hurts
Everyone warns about the climbs. The damage is done on the descents, where the muscles work in a way most people never train.
Practicalities
The metro is small; the buses are the real network
The underground covers a handful of corridors and misses most of the city. Once you accept that, getting around becomes much easier.
Practicalities
Arriving with luggage, and the hill between you and the door
The last three hundred metres of the journey is the part nobody plans for, and in a city of steps and polished stone it is the part…
Practicalities
Crowd pickpocketing is a situation, not a place
It happens where people are packed together and distracted, which is a description of a moment rather than a neighbourhood. That…
Practicalities
Getting around with limited mobility, honestly assessed
The city is difficult, unevenly so, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Some districts are genuinely workable and the difference…
Living There
The paperwork chain, and why one document unlocks the next
Administrative life here runs in a fixed order. Almost every frustration people describe is an attempt to do step three before step…
Living There
Renting for a year: deposits, guarantors and what the contract does
Long leases here have a shape that surprises newcomers, particularly the guarantee requirements. Knowing the structure before you…
Living There
How an old flat handles heat, and why the nights are the problem
Thick walls delay heat rather than blocking it. By the time the building releases what it absorbed, the sun has gone and you are…
Living There
Health cover for a long stay, described carefully
There is a public system, a private one and several ways a foreigner can end up connected to either. The arrangements differ by…
Living There
Where residents actually shop, and the hierarchy behind it
There is a clear order to food shopping here, from the corner grocer to the out-of-town hypermarket, and each level exists for a…
Living There
Earning elsewhere and spending here: what that does to a street
Income earned in a stronger currency or a higher-wage economy behaves differently in a local market. The mechanism is…
Living There
Utilities in an old building: bottles, meters and the winter bill
Gas may arrive in a bottle, hot water may be heated on demand, and the electricity bill has a standing element that surprises…