What is it about Beato?

➔ Praça

Cláudia Almeida e Silva is one of the founders of Praça. Coming from a background in non-food retail, she always found herself drifting towards consumer experience and innovation. She wants her projects to have a good impact on people.

Praça is a local food market in HCB. Here, the product will take center-stage and it’s not just any product. Everything at Praça is made in Portugal, comes from small producers and is guaranteed to have a sustainable and artisanal production process.

Products with a face

Part of the fun of inventing Praça was to spend countless months traveling around the country and scouting for gastronomic hidden gems. Up until now, some of these tasty products were only sold locally and many were entirely sent to foreign markets. This had Cláudia asking herself: "why can’t we have them being catered to the urban Lisbon consumers?"

At Praça, the producers themselves are invited to come and tell their stories. “Value chains that end with consumers looking at the shelves of a supermarket, don’t really appreciate how the storytelling adds value to a product. Who are the people doing this? On what soil? How do they do it?”, Cláudia wonders.

Breaking bread

For people to change their habits and go for new flavors and different kinds of products, it’s not enough to state that a product is amazing. People need to taste those sweet biologic strawberries that need no sugar. That’s why we decided to join two realities: selling the products and hospitality. People who visit will have a food market, but also be able to sit down and enjoy a tasting experience.

If it’s late at night and you're at Praça having some wine and cheese, if you like it and you want to take some home, you can do that - or you can have it delivered to you the next day.

Many decades ago, the Praça building served as a bread factory - so of course locally baked bread is on the menu. Other strong sections, apart from the cheese, are the hams and the wines -  mostly low intervention, with a good national selection. All of these can both be tasted there or bought to go.  

A little bit of history repeated

The building next to Praça used to be a cafeteria - refeitório - for industrial workers. Honoring the history, Cláudia decided to turn it into an open kitchen. Chefs will be invited to prepare meals with the star-products, which are also sold at the food market: fish, meat, vegetables, and seafood.

There’s also a stage for producers to come and talk about their stories and there’ll be good conversations about topics like nutrition and sustainability of farming techniques. Praça wants people who visit to discover new products but also learn something new.

Another building, which used to be a small school for the workers’ kids, will host an academy with workshops and masterclasses for anybody that’s interested.

Overall, the 2 buildings represent 1.700m2. Part of the food market is already open from Fridays to Sundays, with popup events on sunsets. It will close for improvements in August. Currently attracting people from other sides of town, in the future Praça also wants to cater to the community moving to HCB. That’s when the open kitchen will start working.  

Beato for the win!

Cláudia came to Beato by chance. She had a concept in mind and she wanted a place with a soul. Through Startup Lisboa, where she mentored, she heard about Beato.

For someone who lived in Lisbon all her life, it was quite amazing to learn about this entire neighborhood which feels so new to the rest of the city.

For Cláudia, the challenge is putting the stretch of town between Beato, Xabregas and Marvila on the “animation” map and making it a destination.

There’s something different about Beato, Cláudia assures us. “The industrial vibe, the history behind any building, the palaces and churches… the Hub is a big part of that history but the second phase of its development it’s another bunch of good stories, with Beato Convent and Grilo palace. If you dig in and dive, there are so many stories that Lisboners need to know about. I love history, so I can’t wait to share it.”