Food · Hotel Dining
Most Portuguese fine dining travels through Lisbon. For its new three-course menu, Tasca by José Avillez has decided to head north instead. Taste of Porto narrows the brief: a single city, three dishes, and the one sandwich that carries Portugal’s second city in its layers.
The Menu
Three courses, one city
The opening course is Rissol de Camarão, a prawn rissole with coastal prawn tartare, garlic emulsion and chili. A street-level Portuguese classic, plated with the precision the dining room calls for.
The centrepiece is the Francesinha, born in Porto in the 1950s and inspired by the French croque-monsieur. The original is everything Porto stands for: dense, generous, working-class, layered. Tasca’s version uses wagyu tenderloin, veal bacon, turkey ham, cheese, bread and fries, with the same logic and a different pantry.
The menu closes with Doce da Casa, a coffee and biscuit dessert that finishes the meal the way a Portuguese afternoon ends: quietly, slowly, without performance.
Taste of Porto is priced at AED 250 per person and runs daily from 6:30pm to 11pm.
The Angle
Why Porto, why now
Lisbon is the easy default for Portuguese cuisine abroad. Porto carries something different: a working-port identity, bolder flavours, food shaped by trade routes and colder northern winters. Taste of Porto leans into that distinction, with three courses that feel less like a sampler and more like a short editorial on a single city.
Tasca, the chef’s first international restaurant and his only outpost outside Portugal, has held a Michelin star since opening. Taste of Porto is the latest case for treating it as more than a Lisbon outpost: a Portuguese kitchen choosing to cover its country in chapters rather than headlines.
The Setting
A Mandarin Oriental view
Tasca sits on the sixth floor of Mandarin Oriental Jumeira, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Downtown skyline and a terrace overlooking the Arabian Gulf. The kitchen is open. The Portuguese wine list is the largest in the city. The room reads elegant rather than decorated, which matches what Tasca is trying to do with its food.
For Boujeez
Dubai’s Portuguese dining scene is small and almost entirely run through this one address. That places Tasca in a position most restaurants rarely occupy: it gets to define what Portuguese food means to Gulf diners. Choosing to spend a season on Porto rather than the obvious Lisbon material is the kind of editorial decision a serious kitchen makes when it has something specific to say.