Café A Brasileira

Portuguese memory at the station

At the pass, chef Rui Martins keeps Café A Brasileira in Porto close to the grain of Portuguese appetite: eggs, cod, garlic, coffee, the city outside. His role is executive chef, and the kitchen he leads sits inside a house whose name had weight before any contemporary menu was written. Martins works in an identity-driven register, one tied less to novelty than to recognition, the kind that lets a plate arrive with its origin still intact.

Café A Brasileira opened in 1903 on Rua Sá da Bandeira, founded by Adriano Soares Telles do Valle after his years in Brazil and his return to Portugal through the coffee trade. The Porto address came before the Lisbon branch and before the Braga branch, and its original proposition was plain: bring Brazilian coffee into Portuguese daily life, cup by cup. Martins now cooks inside that inheritance. His own working line, “Na cozinha tudo é possível!”, sits well in a kitchen where tradition is not treated as a closed cabinet.

Cod, eggs, garlic, coffee

The menu works à la carte, with traditional Portuguese cooking as its center of gravity. Ovos rotos, bacalhau a bras, and gambas ao alho give the kitchen its most legible gestures: potato and egg broken into richness, salt cod folded into the everyday grammar of the country, prawns carried by garlic rather than ornament. None needs a long explanation at the table. The discipline is in keeping the familiar from becoming slack.

Coffee remains the older program, and it gives the restaurant a different kind of measurement. Café A Brasileira opened on 4 May 1903 as Porto’s first public venue to serve coffee by the cup, at a time when Brazilian beans still needed persuasion in Portugal. Telles used free samples and repeated tasting to build the habit. That act has become part of the room’s method: the beverage is not an accessory to the kitchen but the original reason the counter existed. The wine program is curated, but the strongest through-line is still the roasted bean, ground into a social ritual that began before the restaurant was folded into a heritage hotel.

The room keeps its old proportion

The room carries preserved 19th-century architecture, with the ground-floor café and restaurant held inside the Pestana Porto A Brasileira City Center and Heritage Building. The restoration reopened in 2018 for the house’s 115th anniversary, retaining the historical face while giving the building a hotel life above it. Architect Januário Godinho’s original designs remained part of the recovery, with later updates by APPEL Office’s Ginestal Machado and interiors by Jaime Morais.

Service moves at an upscale casual pace, more conversational than hushed. The counter and dining room have the polish of a preserved address, but the work happening inside is still recognizably practical: coffee poured, plates passed, cod sent out hot, garlic carried through the room. The hotel’s thematic floors, Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Anise, echo the import histories that first gave the café its reason to exist. Martins’s kitchen does not need to compete with that memory. It has to cook clearly inside it.

A heritage address still cooking

Recognition has found Martins beyond this room. He received Chefe Cozinheiro do Ano in 2016, and his work was recognized by Opinionated About Dining Cheap Eats in Europe in 2025. At Café A Brasileira, those markers matter most when they return to the bench: ovos rotos, bacalhau a bras, gambas ao alho, and the coffee that first drew Porto to Rua Sá da Bandeira in 1903.