100 Maneiras

The Restaurant

100 Maneiras occupies a small townhouse on Rua do Teixeira, a narrow Bairro Alto side street ten minutes' walk from Largo do Carmo and the Chiado. The restaurant was founded by Bosnia-born chef Ljubomir Stanisic, who fled the Sarajevo siege as a teenager, trained across Italy and France, and arrived in Lisbon in the early 2000s. He opened the original 100 Maneiras in Cascais in 2007 and moved the flagship to the Bairro Alto townhouse in 2014, where it has operated continuously since. The dining room seats around thirty across two floors connected by a narrow internal staircase - a downstairs lounge that opens to the kitchen pass and an upstairs main dining room with white-clothed tables, exposed beams, and a small chef's-counter at the back of the room. Stanisic himself is a public figure in Portugal (host of the Portuguese version of Hell's Kitchen, a fixture of national food media, the chef behind the Bistro 100 Maneiras spin-off and the Pessoa Hotel restaurant programme) but the flagship remains a deliberately small, considered, chef-driven room.

The menu is a single nine-course tasting at around EUR 120 (a longer twelve-course progression at EUR 180 is offered on weekends) and changes meaningfully every six to eight weeks as Portuguese seasonal product rotates. The cooking sits at the intersection of Stanisic's Balkan upbringing and his two decades of Portuguese cooking: a signature smoked-beef-tongue course that references his grandmother's Sarajevo kitchen; an octopus carpaccio with smoked pimenton oil; a sea-bass-with-pine-needle course that travels with hot embers to the table; a Wagyu beef course with house-made ajvar; and a closing palacinka filled with chocolate-and-walnut that nods explicitly to his Yugoslav childhood. The plates are deliberately personal - Stanisic talks publicly about the menu as a culinary autobiography - and the menu reads as one of the few in Lisbon that does not feel substitutable with another European modernist tasting room.

The wine programme is the room's quietly serious second pillar: roughly 250 references with deliberate depth in Portuguese small-producer (Douro, Dao, Vinho Verde) bottles and a careful selection of Eastern European wines - Croatian Plavac Mali, Slovenian Refosk, a small but very serious Macedonian Vranac selection - that simply cannot be found at any other Lisbon address. The pairing at EUR 75 is one of the more interesting in the city. For a Lisbon dinner that needs to be distinctive rather than merely excellent, 100 Maneiras delivers the personal-chef-narrative format that the city's broader Michelin-starred bench cannot match.