Glasgow Food Stories: How Pastéis Lisboa brought the best pastel de nata to Byres Road

Pastéis Lisboa opened in 2022 after owners Emma and Sebastian were inspired by the new wave of modern pastelarias in Lisbon. After finding what they considered the best pastéis de nata in Portugal, the pair managed to persuade the fifth-generation pastry chef whose family recipe it was to work with them.

“Our pastéis are handmade from scratch all day, every day, to an authentic, award-winning recipe from Portugal, using high-quality ingredients. The result is incomparable to the mass-produced, ultra-processed product you find in supermarkets and high-street coffee chains here in the UK” Emma says.

Inside, customers can enjoy the theatre of watching the tarts being made, as well as perusing the Iberian-themed deli. If you’re looking for artisan charcuterie, tinned seafood and other delicacies from Spain and Portugal, this is the place to come.

You can watch the video above to see what we found out on our visit to Byres Road:

“Pastéis Lisboa is essentially two things. First and foremost, it's a first specialist baker in Scotland, which bakes iconic Portuguese pastel de nata, but also we are equally an Iberian themed delicatessen where we sell produce from both Spain and Portugal.

“It started in 2018. Seb is from Krakow in Poland, and on one of our trips here we had come across a little pasteis bakery, which had just opened, quite an unusual product in Poland. It's not as well known as it has been traditionally in the UK. And we were just intrigued by the fact that they were making these from scratch every day and really, really killing it from day one. It was a huge success.

“That trip coincided with our trip to Lisbon, where obviously everyone just goes around eating pastel, and it kind of got us thinking. It is such a popular product in the UK, but there was nowhere in Scotland where you can get the real thing. So that's what sparked the idea and we started going back and forward to Lisbon and continued eating lots of pastel de nata.

“When we found what we thought were the best ones, we just approached the family, whose bakery they were in, and basically formed a relationship with them. They taught us how to make them. They agreed to give us their recipe. They consulted with us on the ingredients here and helped train our bakers.

“So we are using an authentic recipe from Lisbon, an award-winning recipe, and we have replicated the real deal as closely as we can, and we produced them from scratch every single day. You can come in and see the bakers doing it. It's all about the freshness, the provenance of the ingredients, and putting the real thing out there. And

“Everything is fresh, always fresh. I mean, you're never going to get them more than a couple hours old. Most of the time they're still warm when they're going out to customers straight out of the oven.”

280 Byres Rd, Glasgow G12 8AW