The drinker’s guide to Lisbon: the best bars in Portugal’s capital

Food & drink

The drinker’s guide to Lisbon: the best bars in Portugal’s capital

What to sip and where to summon it including trademark tipple 'ginjinha', barrel-aged port and vintage cocktails. Saude!

Martin Dickie

BY Martin Dickie17 August 2019

Lisbon has undergone a renaissance and drinking is at the heart of it with revellers regularly pouring out of tiny bars to toast the town and impromptu parties getting underway. Its most famous tonics may be little known outside Portugal but, to remedy that, we’ve returned from a tasting tour of Lisbon with libation recommendations aplenty – including five drinks you need to try now.

Pensão Amor - Lisbon - Mr & Mrs Smith

DRINK

Vintage cocktails at Pensão Amor

It’s no surprise that the retro-cocktail movement has landed in Lisbon. To experiment with these historic potions, head to Cais do Sodré, the once-seedy port area that’s been reinvented as the city’s hipster hub. Pensão Amor, a former bordello, is a suitably debauched setting for Blood and Sand, a piquant 1922 blend of Famous Grouse, Cherry Heering, Martini Rosso and orange; or the Corpse Reviver No 2, an 1895 elixir of Plymouth gin, Grand Marnier, Lillet Blanc, lime and absinthe. Find a seat on the antique chaises longues or move to the back room where banquettes circle the bar’s last surviving dance pole.

Ginjinha - Lisbon - Mr & Mrs Smith

DRINK

Ginjinha at A Ginjinha

You’d be doing yourself – and this fine city – a disservice if you didn’t sample ginjinha, Lisbon’s trademark tipple. It was invented by a Galician friar (with clearly more than holy sacraments on his mind), who put sour cherries, sugar and cinnamon into a bottle of aguardente (Portuguese brandy) to ferment. The result is a syrupy liqueur that Lisboetas queue for outside A Ginjinha, a tiny bar on Largo São Domingos, just off Praça do Rossio. It’s a cheap and cheerful diversion on your stroll towards nights out in Barrio Alto – so cheerful in fact that we recommend taking the funicular instead of walking fuzzy-headed up the hill.

Azulejo tiles – Lisbon – Mr & Mrs Smith

DRINK 

Vinho do Porto at Chafariz do Vinho

Ginhinja might be the city’s drink of choice, but that’s not to neglect the country’s most famous export. In Portugal there are four distinct and popular varieties of port, all produced in the Douro Valley to the north. White port is made with white wine grapes and is a lighter, drier version, perfect for an aperitif; tawny is aged in barrels and offers a richer body and a full, oxidised flavour; and ruby is typically younger and scarlet-hued. Your port of call in Lisbon is Chafariz do Vinho, a vinoteca set in the wellhead of an 18th-century aqueduct. Here you’ll be served 30- and 40-year-old barrel-aged ports paired with sharing plates of local meats and cheeses.

Estrela da Bica - The drinker's guide to Lisbon - Mr & Mrs Smith

DRINK

Vinho verde at Estrela da Bica

If ginjinha is a local treat and vinho do Porto more an export, what is the staple on Lisboetas’ tables? Translated as ‘green wine’, vinho verde is a light and ever-so-slightly fizzy wine made from young grapes – highly guzzle-able in Lisbon’s clement weather. This is port’s cheaper cousin; a mainstay of traditional working-class tabernas in hillside neighbourhoods adjacent to the port. One of these neighbourhoods is Bica, a little downhill from Bairro Alto but decidedly hipper, whose quiet streets and low-key restaurants hit the sweet spot between shabby authenticity and certified cool. One of the more popular establishments is Estrela da Bica, which dishes up inventive, wholesome tapas such as beef cheek taco, cod bruschetta, garlic chips and tuna-steak avocado sliders, all washed down with tumblers of refreshing vinho verde.

A Cevicheria - The drinker's guide to Lisbon - Mr & Mrs Smith

DRINK 

Pisco sour at A Cevicheria

Peruvian cuisine has gone global and, with it, the pisco sour (even if the cocktail was invented by an American). At A Cevicheria you’ll find it mixed so finely – oh those frothy egg whites, those tangy Angostura bitters – that you might imagine yourself in a Lima-located taberna antigua. Except here you buy it from a hatch and drink it on the street. It’s this alfresco quaffing that gives Lisbon such appeal, but peer into A Cevicheria, where a giant octopus hangs over well-heeled clientele tucking into citrus-scented ceviche, and you might feel the urge to ditch the curb and bring your pisco sour inside.

Drink in the rest of our city hotels or read on for Paris and its new wave hotels