A lot of bottle in Porto

'Pay whatever you want,’ said the waiter. Easier said than done. We’d just had a dinner of vegetable soup, hand-served from a china tureen, followed by spicy chicken with gooey rice, and almond cake, plus unlimited wine. I asked for an average price but he wouldn’t have it. Was the ¤30 each we left in the straw basket impossibly generous or overwhelmingly miserly? We’ll never know.

The restaurant was the recently opened Canastra Azul, a shabby townhouse with high ceilings and mismatched furniture, in Porto’s historic centre. Not a single tourist walked in during our three-hour meal but there was plenty of local traffic. This kind of set-up is growing in popularity in this north-western Portuguese city, where unemployment is high but a spirit of entrepreneurialism reigns.

This is particularly true in the Miguel Bombarda district where we wandered around the following morning, admiring the many boutiques, makeshift galleries and cafés. In the middle of it all is the CCB, a market à la Dover Street, with sleek shops hawking everything from decorative soaps to stripey deckchairs. In its canteen, creative types with MacBooks were planning their next big ideas over lunch on school-dinner trays. On an adjoining street we found a furniture shop with a sign telling us to ring the bell opposite. After a couple of minutes an elderly woman hobbled out, keys in hand, and let us into the shop jammed to the rafters with antique pianos, bedheads and dining chairs. We came away with a Louis Vuitton-style travelling trunk for ¤50, approximately one hundredth of the price you’d pay for an original the same age.

Porto looks over the Douro river. The streets are winding and cobbled, and the buildings magnificently tiled in geometric patterns, with wrought-iron balconies, usually with an attendant matriarch watching the world go by. In spite of its UNESCO status, most of the properties are much in need of love but the city’s shabby, unkempt façades only add to its charm.

We were staying at The Yeatman, on the opposite side of the river. Its parent, the Taylor-Fladgate Port group (it owns the Taylor’s, Fonseca and Croft Ports), decided to build on the southern bank to make the most of the view of Porto’s lofty bell towers and bright buildings. The hotel has wide terraces and indoor and outdoor pools – the outdoor one is shaped like a decanter, visible from the main terrace, four floors up. The theme continues in the Caudalie Vinothérapie Spa, where I had a Crushed Cabernet Scrub in which honey and grape pips were rubbed over my skin to drain toxins and boost circulation. Of course, I topped up my toxins again with a bottle of Alvarinho in the restaurant’s Michelin-starred restaurant that night.

The hotel sits among the city’s numerous terracotta-tiled wine warehouses. Once upon a time the barrels were brought down the river on boats from the lush, sun-drenched valleys a couple of hours inland to be stored here. Knowing this, a trip to the vineyards was too tempting, so we set out, driving over the Dom Luis Bridge (designed by Gustave Eiffel’s partner in 1886) and following the Douro as it meandered through rural towns and alongside terraced hillsides of uninterrupted rows of gnarly vines.

Exactly halfway across the country we passed a restaurant, DOC, built on a pontoon on the river, that belongs to Rui Paula, Portugal’s answer to Heston Blumenthal. We stopped and tucked into a fantastic four-course meal of sopa de bacalhau (salt cod soup), grilled octopus, and the tenderest of tenderloin with several little amuse-bouches along the way. The ¤100 bill for two was excellent value for lunch at one of the country’s finest restaurants. But that’s Porto in a nutshell: a beautiful, recession-friendly city. Unfortunately for the locals, it looks like it’ll stay that way for some time.

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Rooms at The Yeatman start from €220 per night (the-yeatman-hotel.com). ES