Can food and drink tourism save a city?

Porto is transformed, largely through high-end foodie tourism. It's lovely - though there is a cost. Plus: what I've been drinking this week - in South Africa

Port city: clockwise from top left, chef Nuno Mendes at Cozinha das Flores; looking out over the roofs of Vila de Nova Gaia’s port lodges towards Porto; sardines on the grill at A Peixaria II; Stan Wallut, owner of A Cave do Bon Vivant

As we ordered morning coffee, Nuno Mendes was apologetic. We were in Flôr, the bar of the celebrated chef’s Porto restaurant, Cozinha das Flores, where we would eat that evening. But he wouldn’t be there to welcome us, he said, as he had to fly back to his Lisboeta restaurant on Charlotte St, London, having come up from his Santa Joana eaterie in Lisbon earlier that week. Meanwhile we should try the pastries, he urged (the ham and cheese croissant was indeed almost life-changing.) And a sommelier could show us the cellar, behind a hidden granite door in the attached boutique hotel, The Largo.

This is how gastronomic Porto rolls these days, part of its re-invention as an up-market foodie destination. The city now boasts one two-Michelin-star restaurant and four with one star. The only surprise is that Mendes hasn’t won a star or two for Cozinha das Flores, open two years now, which serves some of the most memorable food I’ve eaten in some while. Meanwhile French-influenced Apego, where we ate another night, sits comfortably in one-star territory, though it too has none.

And for those well-heeled tourists less interested in food and wine, there are a scores of cute coffee shops where you can order your flat white and avocado and eggs in English. Or you can shop at innumerable smart craft shops – ceramics, jewellery, leather, clothes.

It’s all lovely and it’s good to see the city prosperous. But Porto’s transformation does raise some tricky questions about early twentieth-century foodie tourism, and about what it does to the authenticity of an urban culture based on working-class neighbourhoods.

For it used to be very different. I hadn’t visited Portugal’s second city in 40 years: back in 1985 it was a gritty place, its old town picturesque but fading and grimy, its food betraying few signs of sophistication. It didn’t have the safest reputation, either: at the São Bento rail station, a young French guy who had just had his watch stolen, and who I’d sympathised with, launched into a tirade against the place, relieved to have found a French speaker to vent to.

At that station today, there’s a TimeOut food market and a wine bar designed in the shape of a railway water tower, Sala de Prova. I enjoyed some obscure red Vinho Verdes by the glass at the latter, looking down on trains coming and going below, before we moved on to Cozinha da Flores for dinner. There, Mendes’s genius is to combine local ingredients in bold new ways. Cockles with lemon, garlic and coriander on sourdough bread: so simple yet so much going on. Shredded squid with chickpeas, cod tripe and chorizo – so deeply flavourful. Alentejo pork shoulder with sarrabulho rice and grilled brassicas - just intense. And an extraordinary wine list, flawlessly served.

Porto’s shift started in 2005 with Ryanair’s first flights there. Those multiplied: last year there were 76 Ryanair routes to Porto and 29 with easyjet, from various British airports as well as Paris, Stockholm, Spain, Switzerland and elsewhere. In addition, in 2015 the Porto Leixões cruise ship terminal opened at Matosinhos.

But it is in the past four or five years, post-pandemic, that numbers of visitors have exploded – from 3.7 million overnight stays in 2019 to 5.9 million in 2023. Porto has also become one of the most popular destinations, alongside Lisbon, for “digital nomads”, travelling and working remotely for businesses and clients in northern Europe and North America.

The tourists are concentrated in the old town, and across the river in Vila Nova de Gaia, historic nerve centre of the port trade. The port lodges have long run tours and tastings: I did one in 1985, at which house I can’t recall. But now, even though the long warehouses are still there, they are joined in a new “Cultural District” by the World of Wine centre, with its display rooms and museums. This time I toured Graham’s lodge and admired the old barrels and the tasting room decorated with laudatory quotes by top wine critics. I sat with my wife sipping 20 yr-old tawny port in glorious winter sunshine under a magnolia tree in the garden at Taylor’s.

Out to the north of the city, the port suburb of Matosinhos still offers a more workaday aspect in the streets behind its glorious Atlantic beach. But even here, tourists have moved in on the fish restaurants lining Rua Heróis de França. At A Peixeria II, the grilled sardines were wonderfully fresh. But the people on the tables around us on the terrace were French, Spanish and British. And down the road at venerable sardine canners Conservas Pinhais, they still package this quintessential Portuguese favourite – but also offer regular factory tours in English.

The character of the working-class bairros at Porto’s heart has changed even more. You see scattered ironmongers and grocers in those places now – next to boutique pottery workshops, or empty storefronts proclaiming that a new luxury apartment complex is coming soon. The irony is clear, if not to the tourists. “People are attracted by authenticity,” one senior wine industry figure told me. “And they come and then the authenticity evaporates.”

Rents have risen fast, in what is still one of Europe’s poorer countries: in 2022, more than half of Portuguese workers earned less than €1,000 a month. “I’m from Gaia and want my son to be able to live here too,” another wine industry executive told me. “But if apartments cost half a million euros, how is he going to be able to?”

There hasn’t yet been the backlash against tourism seen in Lisbon or some Spanish destinations. But in 2023 Portugal’s then-socialist government froze new licences for most tourism accommodation (a move reversed by the centre-Right administration last October) and offered tax incentives to landlords to rent to locals rather than maintain holiday homes. It also restricted the country’s “golden visa” programme, where non-EU nationals can get passports in return for investment: applicants can no longer invest in property, which is where most of the money had gone since 2012.

There isn’t any simple answer to these pressures. I’m as easily seduced by cool restaurants and nice hotels as the next upper-middle-class Northern European: Porto makes for a lovely weekend of food, wine and atmospheric streets. I’m also delighted to see Portugal’s cuisine being taken in such exciting directions, and to see its unique wines and their bold new winemakers being celebrated.

And it has clearly made the town more prosperous: indeed tourism is at the heart of the city council’s economic development strategy. Porto is a city of 1.3 million and those people need jobs. If you work in a fish canning factory, do you want your daughter to follow you into manual work in a shrinking industry – or would you prefer her to have a career path in the hospitality business, ending up as a manager or running her own tourism-driven firm? Your city is going to change either way: so how do you – or we – choose?

The old Porto is till there, though. I caught a later flight home than my wife, after staying to conduct an interview. Before heading to the airport, I stopped at a nondescript but friendly diner in Vila Nova de Gaia. A waiter set before me a francesinha, so called because it was supposedly inspired by a French croque monsieur – in roughly the same way that some Las Vegas hotels were inspired by Venice. It’s a vast, defiantly unrefined sandwich, white bread with melted cheese, enveloping slices of ham, steak and undefinable sausage meat, with a fried egg on top and sitting in a deep puddle of tomato sauce.

The real taste of Porto? Perhaps. But I’m afraid it’s Nuno Mendes’s croissants and pork shoulder that I will return for.

Five top wine spots in Porto

Prova - sommelier Diogo Amado’s cool old-town wine bar is a relaxed and friendly place offering about 30 wines and ports by glass.

The Wine Box - a big selection of wines by the glass here, and they offer well-priced flights of three glasses from any region or style - you can choose whichever wines you want in them. Good tapas too.

A Cave do Bon Vivant - Frenchman Stan Wallut’s wine bar is noisy and fun (on a Saturday night), with a biggish selection of well-priced wines by the glass, leaning towards more natural styles. Lots more by the bottle too.

Sala de Prova - as noted above, this wine bar sits in a tower next to the TimeOut food market. Perhaps the city’s best selection of Portuguese wines by the glass - and it’s a classy place to watch the sun go down over the city skyline.

Garrafeira Nacional - this isn’t a wine bar as such, but probably Porto’s largest and oldest wine shop, with a vast selection. They do also offer a dozen or so wines by the glass by Enomatic machines.

Old school: a traditional Porto francesinha toasted sandwich

What I’ve been drinking this week… on the road in South Africa

As I may have mentioned, I’m co-writing a book about wine and sustainability with Jane Masters MW, for publication by the Academie du Vin library this autumn. For a few months I’m on a slightly bonkers travel schedule doing some research for that - which has this week brought me to the Western Cape. I’ll write about that properly soon, but for the meantime, these are some of the wines I’ve enjoyed this week.

Hartenberg The Eleanor Chardonnay 2021, Stellenbosch - I loved this producer’s wines, made from regeneratively farmed grapes. This is a seriously classy Chardonnay: judicious use of oak, elegant and well balanced, long - very Burgundian (Street Wines, Vino Fandango, Hedonism, from £27.)

Spier 21 Gables Chenin Blanc 2022, Stellenbosch - Chenin Blanc remains South Africa’s most-planted grape, and a lot of it is frankly pretty indifferent. Not so this wine from 40 year-old Chenin vines, with added weight from a little skin contact and a fair slug of oak. Smoky, quite rich and intense but well balanced with freshness too (Vinum, Vino.com, Tannico, from £25.95.)

Iona Kroon Pinot 2024, Elgin - Iona is just a few kilometres from the Atlantic, and the cooling influence is clear in their elegant wines. Kroon is made from older vines on the highest and coolest plot on the farm. A very Burgundian Pinot, fragrant with freshness and good acidity but with flesh and concentration too (the 2024 isn’t in the UK yet but the 2020 is available at Winoship, Villeneuve Wines, from £36.95.)

Creation Reserve Pinot Noir 2023, Walker Bay - Creation Wines’ vineyards sit on the Hemel-en-Aarde ridge, at the top of the valley of the same name. Although this cuvée is made from their youngest Pinot Noir vines, it’s got nice weight to it. Well balanced, fresh and with savoury notes that put me in mind of some New Zealand Martinborough Pinots (the 2023 doesn’t appear to be in the UK yet; the 2020 is available from Vinum, All About Wine, Winoship, from £30.29.)

• Transparency disclosure: I tasted all the South African wines at the properties as their guest. I visited Graham’s port as a guest of Corticeira Amorim.