Case Study: Bar Douro

Brief.

Bar Duoro are a Portuguese restaurant with two branches; one in Liverpool St/City, and another in the London Bridge neighbourhood of South East London.

The restaurant was founded by Max Graham of Churchill’s Vineyards. With two centuries of growing and producing wine in the Douro Valley of Portugal, Max came to London initially to do a Port Popup on Greek Street in 2014 and was amazed at how there wasn’t any representation for Portuguese cuisine at the same level at Barrafina does to Spanish cuisine.

Now, in their second site at 1 Finsbury Ave, Liverpool Street, they have built a reputation of producing menus using locally sourced and specialist-imported ingredients to offer authentic Portuguese dishes.

The marketing team at Bar Duoro reached out to me, with the food photography brief of capturing food heroes of their new seasonal Winter menus, new wines, and imagery of their team.

Approach.

I started off the project with an intro call with the team to learn about their restaurant and what works best for their brand. A big part of this for the founder was making the imagery feel light and bright.

Based on this, I suggested a 1/2 day session and created a photography package. This included shooting tableside food photography heroes, dish group shots - showing pairings of food & drinks, imagery of team members holding plates to add a lifestyle element, and reportage content of the kitchen team producing dishes and plating up

Shooting their food photography brief on-location with the team - I used a studio flash to create a large natural feeling light. We then worked to capture a collection of individual food photography heroes of dishes, and groups of dishes, with team members interacting with them for a lifestyle element. We wrapped the session by shooting reportage content of the kitchen team creating a few dishes and imagery of their newest wines for their website.

I’m looking forward to more shoots with the team in 2025, and seeing what their new menus look like.