O Talho de Kiko Martins

The Restaurant

O Talho de Kiko Martins occupies a deliberately surprising address at Rua Carlos Testa 1B in Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, two blocks from the El Corte Ingles flagship and a five-minute walk from the Picoas metro. The restaurant entrance is through a small functioning butcher's-shop frontage - a working talho (Portuguese for butcher) with dry-aged Mirandesa beef and Alentejo black-pork visible in glass cases - that opens onto a sleek modern dining room behind. Chef-owner Kiko Martins, one of Portugal's most-publicly-known chefs (television host of Cozinha Aberta, owner of the A Cevicheria flagship in Principe Real, the O Asiatico Asian flagship in Bairro Alto, the A Travessa group, and a half-dozen additional Lisbon addresses), opened O Talho in 2012 as his second restaurant after A Cevicheria and has continuously run it as his most personal kitchen since.

The dining room seats roughly seventy across a long L-shaped main room with polished concrete floors, exposed-beam ceilings, dark walnut tables, dark-leather banquettes along the south wall, and an open dry-aging cabinet visible from every table. The cooking is built around the premium-meat programme: Mirandesa beef from the Tras-os-Montes region (the only Portuguese beef breed with Protected Designation of Origin status) dry-aged in-house for forty-five to sixty days; Alentejo black-pork (porco preto) from the Borba ecosystem; suckling lamb from Beira Baixa; and a careful selection of imported Wagyu and US Prime that handle the international expense-account end of the menu. Signature plates include a Mirandesa ribeye-for-two carved tableside at forty-five days dry-age, a slow-roasted Alentejo black-pork shoulder with mostarda di Mantova, a wood-grilled suckling lamb saddle, and a small but very serious offal section (sweetbreads, bone marrow, the chef's hand-rolled blood sausage) that Martins refuses to remove from the menu. Non-steak plates are deliberately selected rather than exhaustive: three fish preparations, a vegetarian degustation by request, and a strong pasta-and-rice section that supports the larger meat plates.

The wine programme is unambiguously Portuguese: 280 references with deep verticals in Douro (Quinta do Vale Meao, Niepoort, Wine and Soul), Alentejo (Dona Maria, Esporao, the small-producer Reserva selections from Borba and Reguengos), and Dao (Quinta dos Roques, Casa de Mouraz), plus a careful selection of vintage Port and Madeira for the dessert close. Martins himself is regularly in the room - he splits his service hours across O Talho, A Cevicheria, and O Asiatico - and the kitchen is run by a senior chef de cuisine team that has been with the room for years. The MICHELIN Guide listing (the room is in the guide but does not currently hold a star) confirms the kitchen credentials. For a Lisbon evening that needs serious meat-driven cooking inside a deliberately modern room, O Talho is the city's senior steakhouse address.