Building SEDE: Workflow, Conversation, and the Modern Bar
In Porto, SEDE explores a more open and immersive approach to cocktail service, built around a bespoke central station developed together with the team behind the venue.
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A bar built around movement, conversation, and the idea that the station should be part of the experience, not hidden behind it.
In Porto, SEDE was developed as a more open and social counterpoint to Torto, the team’s first venue. The intention was never to create a traditional cocktail bar. Instead, the idea was to build something closer to a neighborhood club: a place where guests could stop in for one drink, stay for dinner, move between the counter and the room, and lose track of time somewhere in between.
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Inside SEDE, Porto
A closer look at the making of SEDE and the bespoke station developed together with the team in Porto. The film follows the project from early installation to daily service, exploring workflow, guest interaction, and the evolving drink program.
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@Tiago Maya
At the center of the space sits a fully bespoke cocktail station developed together with the SEDE team over the course of several weeks of engineering, workflow studies, and operational planning. More than a workstation, the station became the architectural core of the venue. Guests sit around it, bartenders work face to face across it, and nearly every movement in the room flows through it.
As SEDE co-founder José explains in the film, “the station was designed to be like a chef’s table.” Instead of bartenders working across from guests, the experience becomes shared and immersive, with service unfolding from the center of the room outward.
The project was built entirely from scratch. Unlike Torto, where infrastructure already existed, SEDE became an opportunity to rethink every operational detail from the ground up: workflow, refrigeration, prep spaces, carbonation, service flow, guest interaction, and how the bar physically belonged within the architecture itself.
From the earliest discovery stages, the ambition was clear. The team wanted a bar capable of pushing cocktail service in Porto forward while still feeling welcoming and deeply connected to local culture. A space ambitious enough for international recognition, but grounded enough to feel like part of the neighborhood.
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We wanted the menu to feel like a journey through time, but without becoming nostalgic. The idea was to take familiar references, local memories, and techniques, and reinterpret them in a way that still feels playful and contemporary.
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@Tiago Maya
The Language of the Menu
That balance runs throughout the entire experience at SEDE. The drink program is structured around three chapters - Past, Present, and Future - using cocktails to explore different periods, techniques, and cultural references without becoming overly conceptual. Some drinks revisit older bar techniques rooted in prohibition-era practices and fast infusions, while others reinterpret Portuguese dishes and flavours through a more contemporary lens. The Francesinha, for example, becomes a cocktail instead of a sandwich, while one of the signatures featured in the film reimagines the Paloma through grapefruit, blood orange, tequila, and clarified elements.
As the menu moves forward, distillations, carbonation, and flavour manipulation begin to shape the drinks more heavily, pushing the program into more experimental territory while still keeping it approachable and social.
Despite the technical side of the program, the atmosphere around the drinks never feels overly serious. Smaller serves, reinterpretations of classics, and a more fluid pacing encourage guests to explore throughout the night rather than settle into a single cocktail. The result feels social, relaxed, and intentionally open-ended, which is exactly what gives SEDE its particular rhythm.
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Kitchen/Lab
Supporting the entire program is a small production lab integrated directly into the venue itself. Distillations, batching, garnish preparation, and experimentation all happen within view of the guests, making the process part of the atmosphere rather than something hidden behind closed doors.
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@Tiago Maya
The station itself reflects that same philosophy. Every section was developed around communication and shared movement between bartenders: central garnish placement, integrated refrigeration, dedicated service areas, shared workflow points, and enough spatial flexibility for the bar to operate differently between quieter evenings and peak service. One station can operate independently during quieter service, while the second integrates seamlessly into the room during busier shifts, allowing the bar to adapt without ever feeling empty or overcrowded.
The project also became the testing ground for a new integrated carbonation system developed together with the SEDE team. Built directly into the station, the system streamlines carbonation during service while helping reduce visible equipment and clutter around the workspace. Still evolving through real daily operation at SEDE, the solution is being refined as part of a broader system that will later become more widely available.
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There is also a constant sense throughout the venue that nothing is completely fixed. José describes SEDE as a place that will continue evolving through new drinks, collaborations, food pop-ups, and experimentation over time. That openness feels embedded into the project itself. The station was never designed as something static or overly polished. It was designed as a working tool for daily service, experimentation, and long-term evolution.
What makes SEDE compelling is not only the technical ambition behind it, but the balance it manages to strike between precision and warmth. It is highly considered without becoming sterile. Functional without losing personality. A place where engineering, gastronomy, hospitality, and guest interaction all meet around a single central structure.
And ultimately, that was the goal from the beginning: not simply to build a bar station, but to create a system capable of supporting a new kind of cocktail experience in Porto.
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SEDE
R. de José Falcão, 199
4050-215 Porto - Portugal
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Two days in Porto with the Torto crew, celebrating their fourth anniversary with good chaos, familiar faces, and the quiet debut of our new tray prototypes.
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