Bar Douro

Bar Douro was created as a way to bring authentic Portuguese food to London.

With ties to Portugal traced back through the family, Bar Douro has matched exquisite Portuguese wines with all the tradition of the local Portuguese food.

http://www.bardouro.co.uk

Restaurant Review: Bar Douro, Southwark

Vicky Mayer trades the cold, damp London streets for the warmth of Portuguese hospitality at Bar Douro in Flat Iron Square, Southwark It’s a bone-chilling Thursday night when we arrive at Bar Duoro but the welcome we get couldn’t be warmer.

Bar Douro opened in 2016 in foodie Flat Iron Square, with owner Max Graham declaring that his mission was to bring Portugal’s flavoursome food and wines to London.

Decorated in traditional hand-painted blue and white tiles with a vast white marble bar as a centre piece, fans of the sort of hole-in-the-wall places you’ll find in Lisbon and Porto will love the authenticity of Bar Douro.

Add to that a seriously good wine list that has been chosen by Max, who is part of the Churchill’s Port dynasty, you can see why Bar Douro has been so successful since it opened.

Fun, tasty and friendly – Max has created a great foodie destination in Bar Douro.

Bar Douro, London Bridge: restaurant review | Foodism

The Douro Valley, which surrounds the city of Porto, has a food and wine culture that's up there with the best of them.

Restaurant founder Max Graham has some serious credentials, being from a long line of English port makers in the Douro, and he's teamed up with head chef Tiago Santos for this venture in the new Flat Iron Square development that makes inventive use of space with two long marble bars in a compact room.

There's no bar at Bar Douro, which we liked – to try and shoehorn one in would take focus away from the wine and port, and use up precious space.

Instead, there's a Portuguese-only wine and port list, mostly sourced from the Douro and the surrounding area.

Start off with the lip-smacking Filipe Pato blanc de blancs from Beiras; take advantage of some delicious, inky reds from the usually under-represented Bairrada region; and make sure you finish off with a port – it's all from Graham's family estate Churchill's, meaning serious value and the opportunity to try a flight of white, tawny and ruby.

Bar Douro restaurant review, London Bridge

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The buzzLisbon is one of this year's most popular city breaks, thanks to its laid-back, creative atmosphere, arts scene and excellent food.

The mastermind behind it is Max Graham, who spent his childhoods in Porto and whose family founded Churchill's Port, which you might be aware of via its recent pop-ups in Brixton, Carousel and Soho Farmhouse.The lowdownHoused in one of the railway arches of London Bridge, Bar Duoro is an intimate, relaxed dining space, which infuses modernity with traditional Portuguese decor.

Our favourites were the smoked Portuguese sausage as a starter, followed by the garlic prawns, bavette stuck with confit egg, and roast suckling pig – the latter is Bar Douro's specialty and it lives up to its reputation.

Even if you don't consider yourself a port drinker, or thought that it's solely an after-dinner tipple, do try the bar's white port and tonic – a refreshing drink that will do well in the summer months.Perfect for…If you can't afford that weekend break to Lisbon, but want to sample the mouthwatering Portuguese cuisine that you've heard so much about.

This is the closest you'll get to the country's authentic food without having to pay for a flight.Bar Douro, Arch 35b Flat Iron Square, Union Street, London SE1....

Bar Douro, Flat Iron Square, Borough: Restaurant Review - olive ...

Growing up in Porto with the founders of Churchill’s Port in Portugal, Max has been learning the tricks of the trade since he was born, and he’s now on a mission to educate Londoners about niche Portuguese wines and ports.

After heading up a Port pop up in Soho in 2013 and executing successful supper clubs at Carousel in Marylebone and Pop Brixton in 2016, Max teamed up with Bar Douro’s head chef Tiago Santos (previously of Porto’s well-regarded waterside restaurant, Casa de Chá da Boa Nova) for a three-month residency in Porto to really get to grips with Portuguese cooking techniques and traditions.

Max speaks with great knowledge and enthusiasm about wines from Alentejo, Lisbon and The Douro Valley, along with lesser-known Portuguese winemaking regions that he aims to put on the map.

As well as charismatically imparting expert wine knowledge, Max gave us a condensed history lesson, telling tales of how Portuguese Jews hid out in the hills above The Douro and disguised game as pork sausages to keep their beliefs hidden, and of ancient pig-rearing methods to produce ham to rival Spanish Ibérico.

A lesson in Portuguese dishes, wines and history, Bar Douro is a valuable addition to South London’s newest foodie hub.

Bar Douro, London SE1, restaurant review

The catalyst was superchef Nuno Mendes.

In 2015 Mendes, who had been doing wacky superchef food at Viajante, then fusion-tinged, celebrity-friendly food at the Chiltern Firehouse, returned abruptly to his Lisboetan roots and opened Taberna do Mercado, which served steak sandwiches, wobbly custard tarts, grills and petiscos or Portuguese tapas, all in the true lettuce-eating style, with any displays of supercheffery pushed firmly to the margins.

(If we were to stick with the seismological metaphors – which maybe it’s time we quietly stop doing – Taberna do Mercado would be Monte Nuovo, a neat little hill, but an actual hill, in the gigantic caldera called the Campi Flegrei near Naples, which came into being over a single week of quakes and eruptions in 1538).

Bar Douro, London SE1: 'I have to restrain myself from licking the ...

I’m just off the plane from Lisbon when I find myself (with some difficulty: it’s hidden away in Bankside’s new Flat Iron Square complex) in Bar Douro.

But I’ve come back thrilled at the beauty of the city and starry-eyed about the food, head filled with vaguely erotic thoughts of oozing, whiffy cheeses and nutty, fat-marbled hams, of seafood, sweet and pristine, of alluring chips, yellow from their dip in seething, fragrant local olive oil.

Bar Douro offers boards of both cheeses and cured meats, so we ask if they can do us a half-and-half, which they do happily.

You can do as they do back home and have a meat sandwich – roast pork with serra cheese – for pudding, but Portuguese desserts are lush with egg yolks because the whites were used to starch wimples and headdresses in convents: here, ham-fat-laced abade de priscos and a fine pastel de nata (though it doesn’t need its accompanying cinnamon ice-cream).

Bar Douro, with its high, hard, backless stools, may not be a place to linger as we do, and the counter seating may be awkward in parties of more than three, but among the area’s collection of Turkish dumplings, Chadwick Oven pizzas, Mexican carnitas and ramen from, er, Barcelona, it shines brightest, like a Portuguese Barrafina.