José Avillez (Portugal)
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| José Avillez is one of "The World's Most Influential, creative and important Chefs" |
Portuguese
food generally follows an oral tradition. There are no written recipes;
ingredients are measured out in coffee cups by grandmothers. But after
training with masters like Alain Ducasse and Ferran Adrià, José Avillez
is reinterpreting old-fashioned dishes in a very creative and
avant-garde way.
For instance, there’s this very old peasant dish called açorda—a
bread soup, or really, a bread porridge. It’s what a very poor
household would eat on Sunday: sautéed onions mixed with water, bread,
garlic, olive oil, whatever proteins were on hand, with a raw egg
stirred in at the end. José makes a salt-cod açorda, but in his own
style: The broth is velvety and cilantro-scented; the sautéed croutons
are injected with cod stock; there are flakes of gorgeous salt cod and
then a perfectly cooked sous vide egg, which slowly and beautifully
seeps into the soup. José also makes a refined version of bacalhau à brás—salt
cod scrambled with eggs, crispy shoestring potatoes and green olives.
Two bites took me back to when I first had this dish in a Lisbon café
with my family, but José’s version is more elevated, with much more
intense flavor.
José is remodeling recipes like these with ideas he’s learned from around the globe. He’s taking Portuguese food for a ride. Largo de São Carlos, 10; joseavillez.pt; 011-351-21-342-06-07.
