Welcome aboard
@artman51164 and congrats on the purchase of your Canon camera.
You ask a couple of interrelated questions about metering in general and the particular metering modes on your camera. If you haven't already, it might be a good idea to read one or several texts that cover the basics of how light meters work.
Any can work depending on your preferences.
Evaluative metering will make the camera decide on what it estimates to be a good exposure based on the input from its metering sensors and the algorithm embedded in the camera. It's essentially a black box. In my experience, Canon's evaluative metering especially from the era of the Canon 1n was reasonably good for average scenes, but would also be easily thrown off by bright or dark scenes or large contrasts. In this particular case, I would personally not rely on it, although since you already set the camera to overexpose by one stop (by setting it to ISO 200 instead of 400), this overall bright scene would likely record OK.
Partial and spot metering are essentially the same thing, just with a bigger (partial) or smaller (spot) metering area. In either case, you would point the meter at a part of the scene which you know where you'd want to place it exposure wise and then dial in the desired exposure compensation for that part. In this particular case (this film and this scene) I might have chosen spot metering, pointed at the supports underneath the building and dialed in something like -1.5 to -2.0 stops, since that's about the lowest bit in the film curve where I can expect decent differentiation. The rest of the scene is brighter and thus will record OK on color negative film. On slide film I would have metered on the brightest bit of the sky instead and put that on +2.0 or +2.5 stops overexposure to ensure it doesn't blow out and accept the shadows to fall where they may.
See above; the main decision you need to make when metering is to determine where in the scene you need differentiation in tonal values and what is the film's capability of recording such differentiation. In general, negative film (color & B&W) can tolerate overexposure, but underexposure results in a lack of differentiation. Reversal/slide film (and digital) have the opposite behavior. Setting the ISO to a slower speed is sometimes done with negative film to systematically bias all exposures towards overexposure. To an extent, this can compensate for mistakes in metering, but personally, I'd rather focus on metering properly and shooting at box speed (if this is the effective speed of the film, which is certainly the case for Portra 400).
You could do that and it's what I sometimes do when using an older camera that doesn't have a partial or spot metering, or a better-quality matrix metering pattern. I use Canon EOS cameras a lot and frankly never rely on their evaluative metering. If I were pressured to do so, I would do something like what you describe here, but I'd consider it a compromise.
You may realize as this thread develops, that personal tastes differ greatly, and there's no single 'best' way to do this. As always, what matter is that you find a way that works well for you. I feel that a good understanding of how a light meter works is essential in that; given such an understanding, you can use whichever method available to you to good effect.