“This restaurant is different,” says Belmiro de Jesus. He’s describing his own establishment, Belmiro, which he opened in 2020.
And, we have to admit, it’s true. From the menu, with its emphasis on game dishes, to the unique wines – quirky labels that won’t break the bank – the chef has created a restaurant that stands out. If there’s anything we’d add to his descriptor, it would be that Belmiro is also very delicious and very Portuguese.
De Jesus’s introduction to the restaurant world came in 1990 at Adega da Tia Matilde, a legendary Lisbon restaurant.
“I always worked the front of house,” he tells us, of his seven years there. De Jesus is from Murça, in the far north, but after Adega da Tia Matilde, he served tables at a string of Alentejo-style restaurants, reflecting the culture and cuisine of the southern region. It wasn’t until 2005 when, along with a business partner, he opened his own restaurant, the Alentejo-leaning Salsa e Coentros, and decided to move to the back of the house.
“I didn’t know anything about cooking, I never studied at all,” he tells us, of that experience. “I started by serving new things and things I’d learned at the places I’d worked: cozido, bean stew, a series of Portuguese things. I started making these types of dishes, and I brought in people from Alentejo who I’d worked with before. And I became a cook.”
This was followed by Bel’empada, a restaurant named after De Jesus’s Alentejo-style hand pies – to this day, one of his signature dishes. And in 2020, he opened Belmiro, his most idiosyncratic endeavor yet.
“I like game,” de Jesus tells us, when we ask about the “Hunting” section of Belmiro’s menu, which includes dishes such as partridge rice, hare with beans and wild pigeon rice. “I was looking for something other restaurants didn’t have.” Indeed, once while waiting to enter the restaurant, we crossed paths with that day’s game delivery, a man carrying a tray loaded with quail.
Another way Belmiro stands out is via the restaurant’s wine list. “It comes from 30 years of experience in restaurants. Sometimes we go to restaurants and they all have the same wines. I didn’t want to have the same wines that others serve,” explains de Jesus, emphasizing that not only are his selections unique but also relatively inexpensive.
The clientele here is “ninety-nine percent Portuguese,” according to de Jesus. As such, this gives him license to center “traditional” cooking, in particular dishes slow-cooked in pots such as bean stews.
Yet de Jesus isn’t opposed to innovation. This can be seen in what is the restaurant’s most emblematic dish, Ovos Belmiro (described on the menu in English as “potato and eggs”). The dish takes the form of an omelet supplemented with slices of potato, and is de Jesus’s take on migas de batata e ovo, a dish from Alentejo. Yet at Belmiro, those potatoes are thin and crispy, the eggs just set. De Jesus tells us that for each hundred grams of potato he adds four yolks and one egg white (the latter “gives the dish volume”), which are strained through a sieve before hitting the pan. The result is rich, runny, crispy, eggy, and salty – delicious simplicity.
And yet another difference is that Belmiro is a family restaurant. De Jesus’s wife works behind the counter while his son works the floor. In arranging this interview, de Jesus invited us to visit the restaurant on a weekday afternoon, between shifts: “Come have lunch with us!” he urged. We did, and a table was loaded with the elements of cozido, Portugal’s famous “boiled meal,” which is served at the restaurant on Wednesdays (de Jesus tells us that his take on the dish has previously won the prize for Lisbon’s Best Cozido). We started with beers, shifted to white and red wine, and de Jesus described his experiences eating cozido while growing up in the north as we served ourselves boiled cabbage and sausages, we closed with coffee and Madeira, and his wife smoked a cigarette at the table after receiving a kiss on the cheek from her son. It was just like being at home.
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