For more than 30 years, Via Graça – with its gorgeous views over the city and its 14,000-reference wine cellar – has been one of Lisbon’s most glamorous special event restaurants. It was also a tourist restaurant, or maybe a big date restaurant, but it wasn’t really a place that gastro-curious Lisboetas were seeking out.
That changed in 2020 with the opening of 9b by Via Graça, on the building’s top floor, where a new young chef is turning out creative, contemporary food in a more lively atmosphere. The spirit of play and Lisbon-born chef Guilherme Spalk brings to the open kitchen is one that was honed in an internship with chef Alexandre Silva (now of LOCO) and highly regarded restaurants in Barcelona, Belgium, and China.
Here, he’s offering two degustation menus. The pescatarian 9 + B menu, with nine courses, is a tribute to Lisbon with fish and seafood presented in unusual ways. There’s a quail eggs with caviar, Azorean squid with coriander, Vila Real prawns with old bread, and mullet with barnacles and clams from the Ria Formosa, all of it delicious.
This menu is more than enough, but for those who want to go all-out, there’s the 9 + 9 menu with 18 courses including meats. Spalk says to think of it “as if it were a last meal, where we want to have a summary of the best of everything.”
In either case, the pre-dessert lets diners do what they probably wanted to do throughout the whole meal: lick their plates. It comes as a Jackson Pollock painting of splattered and dribbled burnt cream and is served without cutlery.
For more information, visit the 9b website.
9B by Via Graça
Rua Damasceno Monteiro 9-B
Lisbon
Phone: +351 218 870 830
Phone: +351 218 870 305
Email: geral@vgraca.pt
Hours: Monday to Sunday – 12:30 to 00:00
