Time Out Market Lisbon

May 2014: the first Time Out Market

The Mercado da Ribeira is the iron-and-glass market hall on Avenida 24 de Julho that opened in 1882 as Lisbon's central wholesale market. By the 2000s the wholesale trade had moved out to the suburbs and the hall was half empty. Time Out Portugal, the local edition of the magazine, won a city tender to take over the western half and opened it as a food hall in May 2014, choosing the tenants from the restaurants its critics had reviewed. The proposition, printed on the wall, is that everything served in the hall was picked by the magazine.

It worked faster than anyone planned. Wikipedia gives just over three million visitors and €24 million in revenue in 2016 and nearly four million visitors by 2018; the Hamburg Foodservice Award of 2018 followed, and Time Out Markets opened in Miami, New York, Boston, Chicago and Montreal in 2019 and Dubai in 2021. This is the original, and it is the only one with a working fruit and fish market on the other side of the wall.

What is in the hall

The market's own page counts 26 restaurants, 8 bars, 6 kiosks, 5 shops, a cooking school, a concert venue, a disco-bar and a cowork space. The restaurant counters run around the outside of the hall and the bars and kiosks sit in the middle; the tables between are shared, unreserved and cleared by staff. Five chefs with tasting-menu restaurants elsewhere in the city run counters here, and their names are the reason the hall is in every guidebook: Henrique Sá Pessoa, Alexandre Silva, Marlene Vieira, Miguel Castro e Silva and João Rodrigues.

Around them are counters for the things Lisbon eats without a chef, which Wikipedia lists as Azeitão sheep's cheese, Alentejo ham, shellfish, grilled fish, wine, chocolate and the custard tarts of Manteigaria, the Chiado bakery whose tart is the city's usual answer when someone asks whether Belém is worth the tram. Sea Me's octopus hot dog became a stall of its own, the Octo Dog, which the Time Out Portugal page reports as the first in the city.

The other half: the Mercado da Ribeira proper

Walk through the door at the back of the hall and you are in the market the hall was built for: fruit, vegetables, fish and flowers on the stalls the city runs, at the hours a wholesale market keeps, with a fraction of the people. It is the better half for a photograph and the cheaper half for fruit, and it is the place to see what the restaurants on the other side are cooking with. Its hours are not on the Time Out page and the city prints them on the stall doors, so we do not give them; mornings are when it is trading.

It is not a trap, because nothing is hidden: the counters show the food and the price before you pay, the chefs are the chefs they say they are, and the cooking at the named counters is good by any measure. It is also not a tasca, and the people who feel cheated came expecting one. You pay chef-counter prices, you queue at each counter separately, you carry your own plate, you share a table with strangers and you eat under a noise level that the concert venue at the far end does nothing to lower. From 12:30 to 14:30 and from 19:30 on a Friday or Saturday there are more people holding plates than there are chairs.

Our rule: go at 11:00 or after 22:00, pick two counters and one bar, and treat it as a tasting rather than a dinner. For a sit-down meal at a price that reflects the room rather than the postcode, the where to eat page names places by source, the Pink Street a block north has restaurants with tables of their own, and the food and wine walk eats where the hall's chefs learned to. On the question of where any particular television host ate in Lisbon, no source this site can cite settles it, so we do not.

• Go for: the five chef counters, the Manteigaria tart, the fish market next door, a late bar
• Skip if: you want a quiet table, a menu with a price list online, or a meal under an hour at 13:00
• Best hours: before noon, after 22:00; worst: 12:30–14:30 and Friday and Saturday from 19:30

The hall opens at 10:00 every day and closes at midnight from Sunday to Wednesday and at 02:00 from Thursday to Saturday, per the market's own page read on 29 August 2026; it prints no closed days, and the counters open and shut within those hours on their own schedules, so a breakfast at 10:00 finds the coffee kiosks and the bakery open and most of the restaurant counters still setting up. Lunch service is under way by 12:00 and the full hall is open from about 12:30.

There are no reservations for the shared tables and no way to hold a seat; the sit-down restaurants and the cooking school inside the building take their own bookings. The mechanics: find a seat first if there are two of you and one holds it, order at the counter, take the pager or the number, collect the plate, return the tray. Card and contactless are taken at every counter we know of, and the bars in the middle sell wine by the glass and beer to carry to the table. The market's phone is +351 210 607 403 and the email [email protected] for group enquiries.

The market is on Avenida 24 de Julho directly opposite Cais do Sodré station, the interchange for the Metro green line, the CP suburban railway to Belém, Estoril and Cascais, and the Transtejo ferries across the Tagus to Cacilhas. From the Metro exit, cross the avenue and the market is the domed building in front of you. From Praça do Comércio it is a ten-minute walk west along the river or Rua do Arsenal; from the Chiado it is eight minutes down Rua do Alecrim. Bus 22B, the replacement for the closed Bica funicular, has a stop named Mercado Ribeira on its loop from Cais do Sodré up to Príncipe Real, every 30 minutes from 07:00 to 20:25; tram 15E to Belém also stops on the avenue outside.

Fares: any Metro or Carris ride is €1.72 on zapping or €1.90 on a single, the Cacilhas ferry is €1.60 on zapping since 16 March 2026, and the €7.25 24-hour ticket covers the Metro, the buses and the trams but not the ferry, for which the €10.35 version exists. The night is covered by the Rede da Madrugada buses from 23:30 to 05:35, and a taxi rank sits outside the station.

• Metro: Cais do Sodré, green line, across the avenue
• Train: CP Cascais line, Cais do Sodré, for Belém (Belém station) and Cascais
• Ferry: Transtejo to Cacilhas for Cristo Rei, €1.60 zapping
• Bus 22B: stop Mercado Ribeira, every 30 min to 20:25; tram 15E on the avenue

It is the lunch between Belém and the hills, if you take it at 11:30 or at 15:00: the Cascais-line train from Belém station drops you at Cais do Sodré across the road, and the walk east to Praça do Comércio afterwards is ten flat minutes. That is how the one-day itinerary uses it, and the three-day plan gives it a late Thursday drink before the Pink Street bars. The guided alternatives are compared on food tours, the sit-down places on where to eat, and the rest of the Lisbon guide starts from the homepage.