Legacy: Nuno Mendes’s new venture Lisboeta is inspired by his memories of both his father and grandmother
(Picture: Natasha Pszenicki)Nuno Mendes has family on his mind. The explorative chef, famous in a few ways — for the cult Loft Project, the four years of Michelin-starred Viajante, his stint as executive chef at the celebrity flytrap Chiltern Firehouse — has been thinking of his grandmother while working on his new restaurant Lisboeta, which opens on Charlotte Street next week.
“We have these prawn turnovers, prawn rissois, as a snack. They’re just… her, you know?” he says softly — his Portuguese accent coloured by a decade-and-a-half training in America. “The other day I was making them and I was following her footsteps. It was so emotional. That was my biggest influence, that cooking based purely on love. It marked me, it formed me. And when I tasted them, there was that feeling — these are part of my culture. That’s so special.”
Though his grandmother died when Mendes was 13, it’s perhaps no surprise her memory is helping inspire Lisboeta. The word, a term for someone from Lisbon, champions his hometown, just as he did with the 2017 cookbook that shares the name. Whereas much of Mendes’ reputation was built on intricate, molecular cooking, in Fitzrovia he hopes things will flourish in a different direction. “The tone here is informal and casual and good fun,” he says. “It’s bohemian. It starts with me capturing the rhythm of the day in Lisbon.”
And what is that rhythm? “If you live and work in Lisbon, you have all these pit stops that you do,” he says, detailing a roll-call of bitesized meals from 11am through to 5am: snacks and beers and lunches and suppers and drinks through the night. Christ, I say, it sounds pretty full on. “Well,” he smiles, “it’s not always that every day.”
Still, Mendes is hoping the restaurant will facilitate that all-day, all-night approach across its three storeys (although a 5am closing time is sadly impossible). From top to bottom, the first floor will open only for lunch and supper, the ground will likewise offer both but also serve snacks and drinks through the day, while a basement area will offer what his most ardent fans will have been hoping for — a private dining counter with its own wine cellar, where a separate menu will be offered and the vibe will be distinctly high-end. “It will be slightly more immersive, and a longer experience,” he says. And exclusive too, with room for just 10. It opens in late April.
A thread tying it all together is Mendes’ desire “to champion Portuguese food, to celebrate it”. Living in Miami in his twenties, some 20 years ago, he was astonished that “people would be like: you’re Portuguese? Where’s that? South America? I felt like ‘f***!’, you know, ‘forget about the cuisine, people don’t even know where the bloody country is!’” But even over here, he says, Portuguese cooking has long been misrepresented. “There’s been a sort of lumping everything up in one pot and saying, oh, the food of the Portuguese, it’s just like Spanish food — but it’s not, it’s very different. Our coastline is totally different, and we have the African influence, the Indian influence…”
It sounds a far cry from the Chiltern Firehouse menu, somewhere which, he says with affection, is “basically a steakhouse serving, you know, burgers and pizza”. Why did he leave? “I felt like I had nothing else to give the project that I felt that was relevant,” he replies. Does that mean things were good or bad? “Oh, it’s an amazing project and I really enjoyed doing it. I just decided that I would like to have one restaurant at a time in central London. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable with having the Firehouse and then having Lisboeta less than a mile apart, trying to draw the same people.” He says he and the Firehouse founders are still in touch.
Less happy, seemingly, are relations with Mãos, the fine dining spot he parted ways with suddenly in 2020, and with no public explanation. What happened? “No no, Let’s not talk about it. That’ll just piss me off.” That bad? “I mean I got a Michelin star there.” He catches my eye: “I did.” He emphasises the “I”.
At the Chiltern Firehouse, the menus were Mendes’s, though he hadn’t cooked there for a long time. I suggest Lisboeta feels like a London comeback of sorts. “Everybody keeps saying that, and I’m like ‘Shit! I live in bloody London Fields!’” Still, with his name above the door, it will mark Mendes stepping into a kitchen for the first time in four years or so, and he’s determined to create a culture that encourages chefs, not demoralizes them. He says: “When I look at turning 50, I think that we need to be aware of ourselves and to try to preserve ourselves.” What does he have in mind? “People get completely broken in kitchens and they lose their sense of self-pride, their sense of self-esteem. I don’t like that and I see that a lot. I think that we need to strike that balance of work life. I want to have quality of life, and I want that to feed into into my work. That’s something I think a lot of chefs want.”
His menu will be split between cured meats and cheese, snacks, petiscos (small plates), bigger bites like goose barnacles (“treasures,” he calls them), scarlet prawns and acorn-fed Alentejo black pork, all of which will come directly from Portugal “because Lisboeta is about the produce”.
People get completely broken in kitchens and they lose their sense of self-pride, their sense of self-esteem
“But I don’t want to put a lot of air miles on everything that arrives at the restaurant, so most of the rest will be British produce, but interpreted through a Portuguese eye,” he adds. Bigger still will be the sharing pots and platters, tacos and travessas, designed for two. There’s that family influence again.“When you’re going to Grandma’s house or something like that, you know, a big pot just lands on the table. Something you can just tuck into.” He was determined to open “a place that has a very accessible entry point,” so the menu starts at £5 and wine is on from £6 a glass. That said, the pots reach £75 and the wine list isn’t messing about, either. “Well, with the menu there’s an easy base level but if you want to go crazy, you can go crazy.”
It’s not just his grandmother Nuno has on his mind. His father, who died not long after Viajante won its star in 2011, moulded some of his son’s tastes, but the relationship came from fraught beginnings. “I was an only child, but my mum and my father, I think they felt the pressure to stay together because of me and I think they really didn’t like each other,” Mendes remembers. “The only way he connected with me was actually through food because my mum was not really that interested in it. I remember I would go [out to eat] with him, I remember eating things like raw squid, oysters, raw prawns, raw pork. Some very strange things at the age of six, seven, eight years old. But I was f***ing curious about food, I was loving it. So my father and I were really connected with that.”
While most of his projects have come and gone in after just a few years — enjoying a flash of success before starting on the next idea — Mendes says he wants the legacy of Lisboeta to live on. Some of that seems tied up in an uneasy home life, though he won’t be drawn on details. He mentions wanting to share some of his past with his children. “My children, they’re three-quarters Portuguese but born and raised in London. But I wanted them to feel like Lisbon is their own city, too.” Does he get a chance to show them their heritage at home? “My passion for cooking came from that; that love that comes with people that you love being in the kitchen and chatting, and cooking and working together and tasting and all that. Hopefully I’ll be able to share that with them now.” Lisboeta, then, is not a comeback, but the start of a legacy.
