The museum that pours drinks
Pavilhão Chinês is a five-room bar on Rua Dom Pedro V where every wall is covered with display cabinets, every cabinet is full of small antique objects, and the small antique objects belong to a single private collection that the owner spent forty years assembling. There are toy soldiers from the Boer War. There are vintage cricket pads, a stuffed lobster, original Macanese gambling chips, Portuguese postage stamps from the colonial period, an entire cabinet of pre-war Bakelite radios. The cumulative effect is somewhere between Vienna's Café Central and a Wes Anderson set, and it is so committed to its own aesthetic that it works.
The drinks are honest rather than ambitious. Long cocktail list, mostly classics, all reasonably priced for a bar of this reputation. The Aviation comes correctly purple; the Sidecar is properly sweet-and-sour; the bar's strong selection of digestivi from across the former Portuguese empire - cachaça from Brazil, palm wine from Cape Verde, Madeira aguardente - is the more interesting half of the menu. Order one cocktail, one digestivo, and walk through the room once between them.
The bar opened in 1986 in the front room of a former antiques shop. The current owners kept the layout, added two more rooms over the next decade, and have changed almost nothing since. There is a small billiards table at the back. The crowd is half Lisbon literary types and half curious visitors who arrived because somebody told them they had to. Both are correct.