About Us
Merendinha do Arco
There are places in Lisbon that seem to exist outside of time. Merendinha do Arco is one of them. Those who walk through the door for the first time don't quite know what to expect — and perhaps that's the secret. You enter out of curiosity and leave with the feeling that you've learned something that isn't written down anywhere.
The restaurant was registered in 1954 by two Galicians named Jesus and Sanchez, who arrived in Lisbon with little more than their hands and an enormous will to work. The building they chose had once been a coachwork shop — and you can still feel it. The doors are tall and disproportionate, as if the space still holds the memory of carriages and horses long gone. In the beginning, the entrance had saloon doors, the kind from American cowboy films, that swung open both ways with a push. The floor was bare earth. It was another world — and that was exactly why everyone wanted to be there.
Today the space has changed, but the soul remains. The walls of Merendinha breathe history accumulated over decades: laughter, arguments, reconciliations, weddings celebrated between raised glasses, friendships that began with a conversation at the counter and lasted a lifetime. A fado was even born here — composed between tables, the way it only happens in places where people truly feel at home. The light inside always carries something warm and welcoming, slightly golden, like the light of an afternoon that doesn't want to end. The smell is that of a restaurant that has cooked for a long time: olive oil, spices, fresh bread, and something indefinable that only old places have.
There is a ritual the old-timers still remember: when you ordered a drink at the counter, the first drop of liquid was thrown to the floor. "It's for the saint," they would say, with the ease of someone honouring a long-held promise. Nobody questioned it. That was just how it was. That kind of small gesture is what separates a restaurant from a place with true character.
Over the years, all manner of people have passed through these tables — from well-known political figures to city characters nobody would bring home but everyone knew. Merendinha do Arco never drew distinctions. It welcomed everyone with the same quiet dignity. The restaurant is also part of the route associated with Fernando Pessoa on his famous wanderings through Lisbon's taverns — although the poet had died in 1935, nearly two decades before the restaurant opened, the building and the street were already part of the emotional map of the city he so dearly loved.
The family changed over the years. His father, the owner, arrived in 2002; Filipe Castro, son of David Castro, joined the team in 2006; and his son came on board in 2020 as manager, in a continuity that was never planned but makes perfect sense. Running Merendinha do Arco is not just running a restaurant — it is being the guardian of a place where Lisbon sat down at the table and told its stories.
