VDB Bistronomie — Restaurant in Lisbon

5 Stars, no hesitation! The owner Clément runs a perfect operation. He is the front of house and greets you with a smile (even with the mask on) and some enthusiasm. He'll first introduce you to the wine list and we opted for a Portuguese spumante (sparkling wine) to start with while carefuly listening to the description of the 6 dishes available that day.

We were 4 and orders 5 dishes that we doubled each time. The owner recommends between 2 to 3 dishes per person so it felt right.

Every dish was extremely well presented and the you could see (and taste) the care, passion and attention to detail put by the chef. Every ingredients matters and plays its role to master a balanced dish which is pleasing to the eye and tasty to the palate.

Even the bread and butter were awesome! It's difficult to pick my favourite dish as they were all so varied and different in their nature. The most suprising was possibly the smoked broccoli, unusual to see brocolli as the star of a dish :) The prawns cooked gravlax style were exceptionally tasty but so was the melt in your mouht pork skewers! The sarda, a fish from the Atlantic was also very attractive and cooked to perfection; served with finely chopped vegetables and some fresh herbs.

To finnish, we shared 1 of both desserts available that night and again, an explosion of flavours.

Having dinner on the terrace was also great on a warm Summer evening.

If you're in Lisbon, book your table with no...

Self declaration is farm-to-table. I don’t know what this means, but I can still fully recommend this restaurant. Great food, great service, and really good wines. I’ve been here alone for dinner, seated at the bar - soon I was in a nice conversation with the chefs in the open kitchen and the couple next to me. For starters, I had the croquete de carne (take at least two per person for a real course) and the tomates de época - both were really good. Watching the chefs prepare the food was also a nice experience, especially as they happily provided additional explanation for the dishes. Great. I really enjoyed the main course, the Moqueca de peixe e fruto de mar with a caipirinha. The drink might be know, the dish was new to me. Basically it’s a Brazilian seafood stew and very delicious. It consisted of swordfish filet, mussels, and clams. The sauce had too much oil, but all in all it was really good. My dessert was cheesecake de beterraba - I don’t like beetroot too much, but it was really good. Of course, the espresso was pretty good, too. Once the restaurant is full, it can get quite loud. I recommend to focus on the excellent food and surprising wines (orange ones). I...

A cute as the space is, we were disappointed with several elements: 1. They served the whole stalk of the asparagus, including the fibrous part at the bottom that should be cut or broken off. We literally couldn’t eat 1/4 because of this. 2. The fish portion was 4 bites, including the dark, fatty bit (not from ‘Yakitori’ style cooking as they claim, as the word literally translates to grilled-chicken). Also, since we ordered fish, one clearly wasn’t so overly fatty and inedible—like the asparagus, this should have been removed: I find their choices cheap, which is contradictory of their pricing (asparagus was something like 11-13€ and the fish was 21€). 3. There was a water bug (of the cockroach family) on the wall by the kitchen, we pointed it out to the waitress (who did nothing) & then the chefs (who did nothing but act blasé, saying they exist everywhere): In Los Angeles & New York, such bugs are considered a health code violation & drains are treated to prevent such bugs from crawling around...