You are heading home from Lisbon and you want to bring something back for the food lover in your life. Not a generic tourist tin, not a bottle they will never open. Something genuinely good, the kind of gift that makes the recipient stop, taste, and ask where on earth you found it. Most of what is sold in Lisbon’s souvenir shops and even airport stores is chosen for packaging appeal and margin, not for quality. Here is the answer, and it is closer than you think.
Skip the tourist shops
The souvenir shops along Rua Augusta are full of colourful tins and attractively packaged bottles. Some are genuinely good. Most are not, and they are priced for visitors who do not know the difference. The foodie gift that actually impresses is the one chosen by someone who knows their producers, has tasted everything on the shelf, and can tell you exactly why what they are selling is worth having.
The gift that always works: muxama from POP
If you are bringing back one thing for a food-loving friend, make it muxama, Portugal’s prized cured tuna, made in the Algarve from salted and dried tuna loins using a technique over a thousand years old. At POP it comes in elegant vacuum-sealed tubes, sourced personally from a quality Algarve producer, not the commodity version sold by the kilo in market stalls. Sliced thin, drizzled with olive oil, it is intensely savoury and unlike anything most people outside Portugal will have tasted. The tube format travels beautifully in any suitcase.
What to add if you want to go further
A tin of Tricana conservas, artisanally packed sardines in olive oil, lemon or smoked, adds another layer of Portuguese flavour and travels just as easily. A bar of Chocolat Bonnat (Ceylan, Madagascar, Cuba, single-origin grand cru chocolate, rare outside France) adds something genuinely unexpected. And if you want to include a wine, Elliot will help you choose a natural wine bottle with a story behind it. A genuinely impressive foodie gift (muxama tube, Tricana tin, Bonnat bar and a good bottle) can be assembled at POP for the price of a decent restaurant meal.
Why it is better than anything in an airport shop
Lisbon airport has improved its food offer. You can now find decent conservas tins and acceptable wine at Humberto Delgado Airport. But the gap between what is available there and what you will find at POP is significant: in quality, in story and in price. The airport is a transaction. POP is a discovery. Graça is twenty minutes from the city centre by taxi, well worth the detour for a gift that will be remembered.
Also: 5 Portuguese gourmet products to bring home
POP, Rua da Senhora do Monte 38C, Graça, Lisbon. Open daily from 2pm.