Four Brunch Rooms in Santos
Lisbon · 2–3 hours · morning
Four brunch rooms inside a kilometre, and one of them is where you should be drinking the coffee. Not a march through all four — a menu of the street, and a way to tell them apart.
The route
- 1. Dear Breakfast - SantosSantos
Start here at eight, before the queue forms and the small room fills. The pistachio pancake is the order, and the latte is poured with the same precision — which is the standard the rest of this walk gets measured against.
2 min walk to the next stop
- 2. Heim Cafe SantosSantos
Two minutes uphill, and the best of the four. Probably the best pancake in Lisbon, a pavement table if you time it right, and coffee that matches the kitchen instead of trailing it. Come early or come on a weekday, because the wait is real.
1 min walk to the next stop
- 3. Mila - SantosSantos
Fifty-two metres from Heim, and the reason this walk is worth doing in this order. Mila is a genuinely good brunch room with a queue to prove it — the kitchen does the work. The coffee does not keep up, and standing this close to Heim is the clearest way to taste the difference. Order the brunch. You already know where the coffee is.
10 min walk to the next stop
- 4. The MillSantos
Ten minutes west to a quieter street and an Australian import that understood Lisbon immediately. Not a specialty coffee destination and it does not need to be: it does the brunch part properly and backs it with good coffee in a room worth sitting in. It also shuts at four, earlier than the rest, so it has to be last.