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Triplex (TREE-plex) is a bar / restaurant combo. The bar is one of the best in town. The restaurant, if not one of the best, is pretty good too, and has a hip ambiance for dinner. Owner Jose Carlos Tinoco (also of Labirintho, a close-by bar catering to an older crowd) did an excellent job of converting this townhouse into one of the best bars in town, with rooms for different moods and a great garden.

Triplex is located in the heart of the Boavista neighborhood, just one block from Casa da Musica. It occupies an early twentieth century townhouse, with the restaurant on the second floor, and the bar (with a stand-up section and a lounge with sofas) on the first floor. There is also a porch on each level and a relatively large garden that fills up in the summer. The bar is popular after 10:00pm and stays open at least until 2:00am. On the weekends, you can count on a crowded house till at least 4:00am. The stand-up section sometimes bursts spontaneously into a dance floor. They have guest DJs almost every day, playing consistenly good lounge and club music. The crowd consists in sophisticated college students, young professionals, and a lively mix of out-of-towners and insiders. Plenty of opportunities to meet new people.

The restaurant is decorated in simple, clear tones and serves good food in a lively ambiance — many patrons go downstairs to the bar once they finish dinner around midnight or so. Dinner entrees are between 12 and 20 euros. There are also less pricey options for lunch. We wouldn’t say Triplex is one of the ten best restaurants in Porto. But it is certainly good enough to deserve a visit if you’re going to an early concert at Casa da Musica or if you feel like sliding to the bar afterwards. The food is enjoyable and so is the environment.

Appetizers include skewered prawns with mushrooms and herb butter, clams with garlic and herbs, several quiches, and salads. There also a good curry fish soup and a traditional Southern Portuguese soup (sopa alentejana), which features bread slices, olive oil, garlic, coriander, and a poached egg. Fish plates include a good bread soup (acorda) with shrimp, several grilled fishes, monkfish and smoked salmon in puffed pastry with mango, and two staples of Portuguese cuisine — baked codfish with bread and olive oil; and cod fritters with a runny rice with tomato. The meat section features several steaks (au poivre, with cheese, etc.); grilled wild boar loin with mustard ice cream, asparagus, spinach, and gratin potato; and partridge in puff pastry. The chef prepares all of these competently. There are also a few good vegetarian options, such as omelets and pastas. Dessert selection changes daily and is consistently good. The wine list includes many solid values among Portuguese wines. Service is OK.

Price point: drinks at the bar 3 euros and up; lunch around 10 euros; dinner around 25 euros plus drinks.

Address: Avenida da Boavista 911, Porto.

Website: http://www.triplex.com.pt/

Opening hours: restaurant open Monday through Saturday for lunch (12:00-3:00pm) and dinner (8:00-11:30pm); bar open Monday through Thursday 9:00pm-2:00am; Friday and Saturday 9:00pm-4:00am.

Reservations: recommended for dinner; call (+351) 91.494.3039.

Getting there: if you’re driving from downtown, follow the directions to Boavista. Once you get to the Boavista roundabout (known informally as Rotunda da Boavista and formally as Praca Mouzinho de Albuquerque — you can’t miss it; there is a tall column on the center, with a lion crushing an eagle at the top), take Av. da Boavista heading down to the sea (Casa da Musica, an unmistakable building shaped like a quartz crystal, is on the corner). Triplex is right after the first traffic lights, on your left. It is a townhouse next to the Goethe Institute. Street-side parking relatively easy at night, impossible during the day. Several paid parking lots in the vicinity. If you’re not driving, a taxi should take 20-30 minutes from downtown.

The Solar do Vinho do Porto (So-LAR doo VEE-gno doo POR-too) is — on a par with Vinologia — one of our favorite places to enjoy port wine. It is a comfortable bar operated by the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto (Port and Douro wines Institute), the state agency that regulates the port wine industry. This means two things. First, on the upside, it is one of the very few places where service is both deeply knowledgeable on port and absolutely unbiased about which producers are best. Second, on the downside, it is not an “in” place; rather a quiet, old-fashioned wine bar where you focus on the wine. We think the pros more than compensate for the cons. Besides, the bar is installed right next to the Museum of Romanticism, in a lovely XIX century mansion perched on a slope overlooking the river — and there is outdoors seating when the weather is nice.

The Solar do Vinho do Porto has the widest and most consistently good selection of port available in town. Moreover, it has excellent selection for all price points, from no-frills tawnies and rubies to four-digit vintages and colheitas. Since it attracts many people willing to try out port and know a bit more about it, there’s always a good number of vintages and LBVs waiting to be poured any given day (these wines have to be consumed within a few days of opening the bottle, so that most places don’t have many choices at any given time).

The staff consists on the most knowledgeable port sommeliers you will ever find. These are the same people that judge wines in the mandatory blind tastings by an official state-appointed panel that precedes any decision on the part of producers to decide what to label (and how much to price) their port wine.

If you didn’t know, it’s not up to the producers to decide, for instance, what gets labeled a vintage, or an LBV (late bottled vintage), or a 10-year old blend. Producers submit to the Institute samples prepared by their in-house wine makers. The Institute organizes a blind tasting of those samples by a panel of experts and, based on the panel’s recommendation, issues a binding decision on whether the producer can indeed turn the wine in question into, say, a vintage, or whether it must settle for the less prestigious LBV label.

Contrary to what happens in the port wine cellars across the river (and in wineries around the world), the sommeliers here have no vested interest in pushing any particular brand on you. In fact, they have themselves selected the wines on offer at the Solar do Vinho do Porto. The process works as follows. Every year, port wine producers are invited to submit up to five wines for consideration to the Institute. These are tasted blindly, according to each category (ruby, tawny, 10-year old, 20-year old, 40-year old, LBV, vintage, colheita, etc.) and divided into price ranges. The tasting panel then selects up to three wines from each brand to sell at the Solar do Vinho do Porto. They are offered by the glass and also for sale, so you can satisfy your wine-shopping needs here too.

Besides port wine, the Solar do Vinho do Porto has very little on offer — as it should be. There is mineral water, a few options for kids, crackers to cleanse the palate between tastings, and an excellent Serra da Estrela, the king of Portuguese cheeses, served in two varieties — hard and soft.

The decor is a bit dated, but everything from the lighting to the sofas is very comfortable. The small garden is delightful and the view is excellent, extending from the port wine cellars to the river mouth.

Whenever we have foreign friends in town and want to introduce them to port wine, we head to the Solar do Vinho do Porto after dinner and ask the somellier to pick a good choice for one of each of the following: a ruby, an LBV, and a vintage (all wines aged in the bottle); plus a tawny, a 10-year old, a 20-year old, a 40-year old, and a good colheita, like a Krohn from the fifties or sixties, when they had were several good years (all wines aged in wooden casks). We place all he glasses on the table in two rows — ruby-type and tawny-type wines. Then we start with the least expensive ruby and pass the glass around, working our way up to the vintage. We pause for a bit and do the same with the tawny flight, workng our way up to the colheita. Then, if you want to punish yourself a bit, ask for a second glass of the cheaper wines and see how they suddenly seem much worse than they did before you tried out the better wines.

Price point: port wines by the glass 3 euros and up; 10 euros and up by the bottle.

Address: Quinta da Macieirinha - Rua de Entre Quintas 220, Porto.

Website: http://www.ivp.pt/

Opening hours: Monday through Thursday, 2:00pm to 8:00pm; Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm to midnight. Closed on Sundays and public holidays.

Reservations: not needed; call (+351) 22.609.4749.

Getting there: getting to the Solar do Vinho do Porto is tricky by car; getting back after a few glasses of port is even trickier, so we strongly recommend taking a taxi there. The staff will be glad to call a taxi for you on your way out — or you can climb the very steep street as a way of working all that port out of your system. Note that although there are signs point toward the Solar on the main streets, the way there is through narrow winding streets more appropriate for medieval ox carts than to twenty-first century highway drivers. If, however, you insist on driving, it should be easy to park the car right outside the Solar. From downtown Porto, go up Rua de Ceuta. Enter the tunnel, from which you will exit on the last exit, towards Rua D. Manuel II. Follow the street until you see a large gated garden on your left. Continue going down slowly, trying to get to the left lane. As the street ends you’ll see a bowl-upside-down shaped building on your left, inside the gated garden (it is the Palacio de Cristal, an exhibition center). Most of the traffic will turn right at the end of the street. Don’t follow them. Stop on the traffic light on the center of the street — your left lane — and when possible start going down the narrow cobbled stone street that is very slightly to your left — Rua de Vilar. Once in Rua de Vilar (cobbled stone), turn on the first street that will appear to your left. This is the very narrow Rua de Entre Quintas and after a few turns it starts going steeply down the slope. Just follow the street to the end — it has no way out. It literally ends at the gate of the Museum of Romanticism, through which you gain access to the Solar. Go through the gates and park right there. The Solar is to your left when you are facing the Museum house. If you’re not driving, a taxi should take 15 minutes from downtown.

Praia da Luz (PRAH-ya da LUSH) is a place to imbibe the ocean. It is a restaurant, coffeeshop, and bar with both indoor and outdoor seating built on the beach — literally, the structure is built on stilts dug deep in the sand. The outdoor section is heated in the winter (and so is the indoors, by a lovely fireplace) and there are plenty of blankets to go with a hot chocolate and a book. Since it’s facing West, it is perfect for viewing the sunset. But it is an excellent place around the clock. Go there for breakfast croissants, have a light (or not so light) lunch, a full dinner, or drinks in the afternoon or in the evening. It stays open till 3:00am, with a DJ and, sometimes, a dance floor. The clientele changes with the time, but is always hip and mostly quiet during the day. Music is quiet during the day and groovy in the evenings.

The building is a light metal and glass slab that fits well with the scenery. Contemporary decor in light pastel colors, enabling you to focus on what matters — the view. The open ocean during the day and the well-lit rocks and sand with the dark ocean as a background in the evening. Here’s what Porto nightlife Guide has to say about it:

“It’s more than Shakespeare. It’s a midsummer night’s dream and a winter one too. The surprises start on the avenue with white flags fluttering in the sea beeze. The benches on the sidewalk announce the happy event: a magnificent open air restaurant was born in Foz in 1989, but it seems like yesterday. By night the rocks in the beach shine under the spotlights. The white sands are striped by beams of light. My god, how beautiful this is, the most beautiful open air restaurant in the country!”

Though you’ll most likely return for the view, not the food, the menu does not disappoint. There are excellent small grilled padron peppers (a hot delicacy from Galicia, in Northern Spain), a good carpaccio, and carefully prepared shrimp crepes. The fish section includes a great cherne (similar to sea bass, only better) with almonds; salmon with roquefort sauce; bacalhau (salted cod) baked with bread; baked octopus (polvo); a terrific white sea bream (sargo) baked in a salt crust; and a anglerfish (tamboril — one of our editors’ favorite fishes) with a green pepper sauce. You won’t regret trying the beef with dates or the duck magret with honey and spices. Finish your meal with a slice of tatin pie or some ricotta with honey and walnuts.

Service is laid-back, sometimes a bit slow.

Price point: coffee drinks are around 2 euros; lunch around 15 euros; and dinner around 25 euros.

Address: Av. do Brasil, Porto.

Website: http://www.praiadaluz.pt/

Opening hours: open 365 days a year from 9:00am to 3:00am (well, it actually closes a little earlier on Christmas Eve and opens a little later on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day…).

Reservations: suggested for dinner; call (+351) 22.617.3234.

Getting there: easy access by car; otherwise, take a taxi. If your driving from downtown Oporto, the easiest way of getting there is to take Rua Mouzinho da Silveira down to Praca do Infante, turn right and follow the river to the sea — Foz. Continue along the seafront. Praia da Luz is on your left in the beginning of Av. do Brasil, which is the first long straight avenue you’ll find. Parking is usually hard, especially during the weekend and in the summer. All you see from the street level is a small arch that is lit at night and a few white flags fluttering in the breeze. If you park and cross the street to the seaside, you’ll easily spot the coffeeshop. If you’re not driving, take a taxi (30 minutes).