Back from a few days in Porto, here is my testimony in the form of a discovery book... tasty and gourmet discoveries of course!
In a few days, I went through a few pages of a living manual of Portuguese food culture. Each dish, each product, each place told me a story, and always the same double lesson: In Portugal, constraint becomes creativity, and what is foreign can become identity.
A McDonald's in an art deco café : between heritage and globalization, we go in for a burger, we leave with a stained glass window in memory.
The McDonald's in Praça da Liberdade, installed in the Café Imperiale, which tells us about the entire coffee value chain
La Francesinha : a French toasted sandwich passed to the Portuense gym, where excess becomes conviviality. To be avoided during the weight loss phase.
Francesinha, specialty of Porto breweries
Guts, caldo verde, alheira, port wine : when poverty can be transformed into pride, sobriety into heritage, technical ingenuity into a global legend.
Manufacture of Port wine - a wine fortified or “mutated” by the addition of brandy (wine alcohol of course)
The Bolo de Arroz : a portable and digestible little cake, designed in the 19th century for workers and students, which has become, in my opinion, an icon of food design.
The Beira Baixa Misto (DOP) : three milks, one cheese — a symbol of peasant pragmatism and of the balance sought under constraints.
The piri-piri : an American pepper via Africa, adopted as if it had always been Portuguese.
For the faint of heart, abstain.
Portugal seems to me to have this rare ability: absorb the elsewhere to make it “common”.
In our Explor'Alters* grid of food cultures, Portuguese gastronomy illustrates a key dimension:
one short distance to food borders : inclusion of influences, openness to mixing, pragmatism in innovation.
France, on the contrary, represents a Strong codification : valorization of a central canon (butter, sauces, metropolitan areas...), with exotic contributions that are most often relegated to the periphery.
If you are interested in this grid to decode a food culture or a product category in a region of the world, let us know!
A country small in size, but huge in terms of Cooking lesson that it offers to the world.
And now? At the table with... the suite!
This article is based on a selection of the daily posts I published on LinkedIn during a trip to Porto in September 2025. Chez AlterMakers and thanks to our Les Explor'Alters method, we help our customers explore representations, eating habits and concrete alternatives in the service of the sustainable transformation of our food systems. Since 2020, we have conducted explorations in France (Hexagone, Antilles, Réunion), Ghana, Antilles, Réunion), Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Belgium, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, Shanghai, Shanghai, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, Brazil, Madagascar...
*Explor'Alters is the field method ofAlterMakers to decode food cultures. In a given geography, we explore the habits and levers of food preference, by going to see what really happens in the fields, on the markets and on the shelves, in the kitchen and on the plate. We look at the ingredients and where they come from, the gestures and utensils, the recipes and stories that carry them, the influencers who embody them, the selling points and the marketing codes. It is a complete and in-depth reading that reveals the cultural code of a market or a food category... with as always, a certain taste for alternatives and the sustainable transformation of our food systems!
