Creatively and healthily filled bowls meet drinks that you won’t find anywhere else in the world. The name says it all at the Bowls&Bar in Lisbon. We visited the restaurant during our trip to the Portuguese capital.
Bowls filled with raw salmon fillet pieces, rice, colourful vegetables, avocado cream and cream cheese or with quinoa, baked pumpkin, zucchini spaghetti and wild spinach. Drinks with homemade infusions made from natural ingredients that give them their extraordinary flavour. This is the Bowls&Bar.
Products as healthy and little processed as possible
For over a year now, the restaurant has been located in the popular Lisbon district of Bairro Alto. Since then it has developed from an insider tip among tourists to one of the top addresses for healthy – and partly vegetarian – food as well as good drinks in the Portuguese capital. Kate Rodionova, the creator and owner of the restaurant, has been involved with nutrition for years and swears by organic food and natural ingredients. She therefore wants to offer just such a meal in her own restaurant and always tries to use products that are as healthy and as little processed as possible.
Traditional Portuguese cuisine is quite greasy. Most Portuguese people simply love this type of food and in the past have hardly thought about the health aspects of their diet.Sérgio Martins (Manager)
A restaurant concept that is anything but standard for Lisbon. „The traditional Portuguese cuisine is quite greasy. Most Portuguese people simply love this type of food and in the past they have hardly thought about the health aspects of their diet,“ says Sérgio Martins, manager and bartender at the Bowls&Bar. It is therefore not easy to find producers in the Lisbon region who can reliably and regularly supply a restaurant with high quality organic food. It is, by the way, also not always easy to get Portuguese people enthusiastic about their cuisine. In contrast to tourists, local guests are often irritated by the taste of the food because they have never had organic ingredients on their tongue.
Taste has to develop
But more and more people in Lisbon are discovering a healthier lifestyle for themselves. According to Sérgio, this is also due to the fact that Portugal is opening up more and more. After an economically difficult time, the country has invested a lot in tourism in recent years. People from all over the world now come here and with them a different lifestyle. This is also noticeable in products such as coffee. While the „Third Wave of Coffee“ has been sloshing through Scandinavia and Germany for a long time now, which regards coffee as a stimulant instead of only a commodity and lets small local roasting plants shoot up from the ground, there are only a few non-industrially roasted beans to buy in Portugal. The coffee in the Bowls&Bar is produced especially for the restaurant of the Lisbon roaster Flor Da Selva. One guest incomprehensibly recently called it „the worst coffee in all of Lisbon“. Kate and Sérgio take it calmly, even writing this comment on a large sign in front of the shop. „Taste just has to develop,“ says Sérgio. „We are sure that in the future more and more Portuguese will appreciate our way of cooking and good products from the region“. We firmly believe in it and will definitely come back on our next trip to Lisbon for the delicious food, the unbelievably delicious drinks and the fantastic tasting coffee.
