In an unexpected twist, our Christmas gifts came early.
The 2019 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards have just awarded our Porto Food Guide as the national winner in 3 categories: Best Culinary Travel / Food Tourism Book, Best Self-Published Book, and Best Digital Book for Sale.
This competition happens annually since 1995, and is one of the world’s major awards for culinary writing—they’ve been called the Oscars of gastronomic literature. The competition happens in two phases: first, the jury selects the national winners of each category, and second, those winners will compete amongst each other for the grand prize of “Best in the World”.
Which means… Porto Food Guide is a finalist in the “Best in the World” competition, in those 3 categories! Well, we’ll only know how that goes somewhere around Spring of 2019 (please wish us luck).
BEST CULINARY TRAVEL / FOOD TOURISM BOOK
BEST SELF-PUBLISHED BOOK
BEST DIGITAL BOOK FOR SALE
While overcoming our shock, we’d like to thank the jury for this great honor, but also all of those who have bought our book, and the faithful readers of Amass. Cook..
This guide was a labour of love, intended to explain in a simple, yet thorough manner, what enjoying Porto’s gastronomy is all about.
Porto Food Guide was made, single-handedly, by us. Which on a side-note, was probably very naïve. When all things were said and done, we had talked, walked, tasted, wrote, photographed, edited, designed, marketed, and promoted this book for a possibly imprudent amount of time. We learned a lot more than we could ever have imagined, and it was very hard work. But in the end, we know that we could never have neglected our little ode to two things we love, Porto, and food.
The title of this ebook is self-explanatory: it’s about Porto’s food (really?). It speaks of its traditional dishes and ingredients, its wines, its markets and specialty grocery stores, and ends with a selection of some of the city’s finest restaurants and bars. You’d wonder how one could fill 154 pages about the food of a not so big city like Porto.
Well, as we mention in our book, Porto is a genuine gastronomical city. It’s not in the process of becoming a so-called trendy food destination, because it already is a food-lover’s paradise. And it probably has been so, in many different ways, for many centuries.
If you read through historical documents, you’ll always find Porto (and the North) as a reference in Portuguese gastronomy. Perhaps it came to be so with a medley of talent, necessity, pride, bourgeoise, agriculture, war, merchant navy, and the many other features and events that compose Porto’s rich history. This remarkable heritage outlined the city’s perspective on food far before our birth time, and it still does today. It has irrevocably shaped the taste and memories of those who were born (or adopted) here. In Porto, food is a permanent subject, discussion, and passion.
It’s a fact that these are fast-changing times. Sometimes even we feel overwhelmed with all the novelty that pops up in every corner. But at the end of the day, we want to believe that to a considerable extent, one will find that those who shine will persist, and those who don’t will fade away.
It would be easy to make that comment light-heartedly, but it comes with a great deal of responsibility. The sustainability of a rapidly growing tourism sector brought tension amongst the fragile balance between the old and the new, and it doesn’t come about without victims. In Porto Food Guide, we tried to select a balanced line-up of eateries, that range from the most traditional tavern, to the Michelin-starred restaurant. Because it’s just as important to praise a humble dwelling with incredible food as it is to gape beyond a beautiful dish. Moreover, it is also crucial to value the richness of our markets and food shops, and the hard-working people behind them, which is something you’ll also be able to enjoy in our book.
With all this writing and commotion, somewhere deep in our minds broods the dangerous idea of writing another book…
But for now, as we are in celebration mode (and because we are our own publishers), we’re handing out a special and very limited 40% discount on Porto Food Guide. If you want to be one of the 20 lucky ones, you just need to use the Promo Code: gourmand when purchasing your ebook here.
So, as a final note, we’ll keep on celebrating this unbelievable achievement, and hope that our book will continue to inspire others to discover Porto’s incredible gastronomical heritage.
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