It’s that quiet time between lunch and dinner, and we’re sitting with chef Leonor Godinho in a tasca, or rustic, casual, Portuguese restaurant. The furniture is sturdy but unremarkable, and walls are mostly bare except for a couple old photos, a child’s drawing and the ubiquitous vitrine, a built-in refrigerator.
“I knew about this place because my best friends had just moved their studio to this building,” Leonor tells us of the space, formerly known as Casa do Alberto. “I would come here all the time to eat with them, and they would joke with me, ‘It would be great if this was yours!’”
Not long after one of these meals, Leonor tells us, she spotted the space on a real estate listings website. She approached the owner – the eponymous Senhor Alberto – directly, and in her words, “It just happened.” The restaurant was hers. She decided to call it Vida de Tasca, “Tasca Life.”
Decades ago, a young chef taking the reins of a traditional restaurant was an utterly unremarkable occurrence, a standard course of events. But these days, chefs follow different routes and have different aspirations – aspirations that don’t typically revolve around the cuisine of their parents.
Leonor’s career trajectory is an example of this. She was a student of clinical psychiatry who was food blogging on the side before she found herself as a finalist on MasterChef Portugal. She spent the next five years at the Altis Belém Hotel, eventually working at Michelin-starred Feitoria with João Rodrigues, one of Portugal’s most lauded chefs. As one of the founders of the New Kids on the Block, a conglomerate of young, up-and-coming Lisbon chefs, she developed the eclectic, international-leaning bar food menu at Musa. Today, she still oversees the kitchen at Vago, where a recent example of a menu item is wood ear mushroom salad, fried pleurotus, pickled daikon and furikake, and where an in-house DJ is a standard feature. Looking at Leonor’s resumé, one wouldn’t think she would have any interest in cooking at the most conservative, traditional type of Portuguese eatery. Especially because tascas didn’t play a large part in her life until recently.
“We didn’t always go to tascas [when I was growing up],” she tells us. “It’s a thing I do more now as an adult than when I was a kid.”
She tells us she’s especially drawn to what one might call one-pot dishes – stews, braises, rice dishes – arguably the most tasca menu items of all.
“I was always talented at doing these rice dishes – I love cooking them,” she says.
Yet those familiar with her career had a different idea of the direction she would take Vida de Tasca.
“People heard I was opening this and asked me, ‘Oh, so you’re going to do these little dishes?’” – referring to the contemporary “shared plates” style of dining at Vago and similar places – “and I was like, ‘No!’”
On the surface at least, Vida de Tasca is a pretty standard Lisbon tasca. There’s a short menu that changes every day but that always features at least one of the type of hearty one-pot, often rice-based dishes that Leonor loves – arroz de pato, Portugal’s famous duck rice; cabidela, chicken braised with rice and blood; filetes de polvo com arroz do mesmo, Porto-style octopus rice. Starters include utterly ubiquitous items such as olives, deep-fried salt cod cakes, croquettes, a small wheel of cheese, a basket of bread. Sides include a simple mixed salad or boiled greens. And dessert doesn’t stray far from the repertoire of items you’ve seen in the glass case of your Lisbon local: chocolate mousse, a few desserts revolving around powdered Maria cookies, seasonal fruit. Her loyalty to the genre even extends to Leonor having retained much of the previous restaurant’s furniture and nearly all of its infrastructure, most importantly that vitrine, a near-obligatory tasca item.
If there are any divergences from the tasca norm, they’re subtle – and welcome. The salt cod cakes are fried to order, emerging from the kitchen hot, crispy, and light – a stark contrast with the cold, limp, stodgy versions served at most places. Serving sizes are mercifully slimmed down. The vegetables aren’t boiled to death. The seasoning is more precise. And a second or two more goes into the presentation of each dish. But the package as a whole is undeniably, unabashedly tasca food.
Leonor tells us that she’s drawn to this type of dining in part because it’s a genre of restaurant that’s changing rapidly.
“I’m really not really doing this for the money,” she says. “I’m doing this to preserve tascas. They’re disappearing, especially because of [raising] rents.”
According to Leonor, part of this effort requires retaining the tasca price point, a serious challenge in this era of inflation. She wants Vida de Tasca to appeal to local diners, and this, paired with the restaurant’s non-central location, means that up to this point her customers have been, in her words, “Portuguese, Portuguese, Portuguese.”
Another place where Leonor diverges from the tasca model is in her effort to avoid the type of family business that has no separation between the personal and the professional.
“I want to pay my staff well; I don’t want them to work more than eight hours per day,” she tells us. “It’s not impossible but it’s hard, it’s a challenge.”
In many ways, turning to the uber-traditional, typically family-dominated tasca genre might be the most unconventional twist in Leonor’s already non-linear career.
“It’s so strange. People say, ‘Wow, great concept!’” she tells us. “But I’m like, ‘No. I’m just doing exactly what a tasca is supposed to be – it’s not a concept.’”
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