While Bolhão’s century-old original structure is being restored, the vegetables, fruits, fish and flowers of the market have been brought to a decidedly less striking indoor location with no windows. The place is new, strange to many, but the usual faces are there. We know their names, their smiles. The only thing we’re uncertain about is the setting. “It looks really beautiful,” says Rosa, “I thought it was going to be a mess, as it was something to remedy, but it’s beautiful.” Rosa tells us that she hasn’t been to Bolhão for at least a year, which is about how long the original location has been shuttered for renovation. As we walk with Fernando and Rosa, a chorus of “good days” rings out from all directions. We pass through corridors of fruit, nibble on some chorizo, smell the flowers. “Excuse me, where’s the herbalist Augusto Coutinho?”

“Think of O Fernando as your home.” This was one of the first things the owner of O Fernando, Ricardo Monteiro, ever said to us when we first met him a few years ago.

More than forty years ago, on the corner of Porto’s Rua da Alegria, or “Street of Joy,” sat an old charcoal shop. In 1978, after many years working in a renowned local restaurant, Fernanda (Nanda) Sousa took over the shop with her husband and, together with another couple, they converted it into what’s locally known as a “pastoral house.” With barrels of wine scattered about and ham hocks hanging from the ceiling, it was the quality of the food, not the interior, that elevated Casa Nanda to restaurant status. Now, 40 years on and having stared Covid-19 down, Casa Nanda has reopened on Rua da Alegria after a months-long renovation.