Porto Food Week celebrates gastronomy and honors Maria de Lourdes Modesto
A dinner honoring the gourmet Maria de Lourdes Modesto and another dedicated to the cabidela are part of the Porto Food Week program, an event focused on the national gastronomy that will take place from the 21st to the 30th of this month.
The first Porto Food Week is a project of Edições do Gosto, the company responsible for organizing three editions of Lisbon Food Week and initiatives such as Chef Cook of the Year and the Cooks’ Congress.
“The basis of our work is the kitchen professionals,” explained the founder and director of Edições do Gosto, Paulo Amado, who this year received the Personality of the Year award in the cuisine attributed by Revista de Vinhos.
Paulo Amado says that “the country has made a giant turn as it has grown and it has also reached the gastronomy and Porto is very strong”, with new restaurants and “dynamic chefs” that Porto Food Week aims to celebrate and promote.
Vasco Coelho Santos, from the Euskalduna Studio restaurant, is part of this new generation of chefs and was the idea of the homage to Maria de Lourdes Modesto, 88, a major figure in Portuguese gastronomy, known for the cooking program he presented for 12 years at RTP and books such as Traditional Portuguese Cuisine.
More than 50 years separate Vasco Coelho Santos from Maria de Lourdes Modesto, but the young chef, who says he practices “a multicultural kitchen” with Portuguese products, declares himself a fan of the popular gourmet and reveals that he has “all” his books, some in “first issues”.
The tribute will be on the 26th, at Euskalduna Studio, at a dinner with “surprise menu” that is already exhausted and has “40 people on the waiting list,” said Vasco Coelho Santos.
Maria de Lourdes Modesto was invited and “wanted very much to be present”, but she is having “logistical problems” and therefore “only on the eve of the day or on the day itself will it be known”, said the promoter. the documentary “about the honoree to be screened during the dinner on the 26th.
Porto Food Week unfolds in multiple activities and one of which Paulo Amado highlighted is the “dinner dedicated to the cabidela”, open to the public and on the first day of the event, in which five chefs will cook cabidelas of rooster, lamb, rabbit, and boar.
In that dinner, added the same person in charge, the Order of Cabidela will be formed, a gastronomic confraternity with “kings, princes, and knights” and with ceremonial proper for the enthronement of its founding members, that from then on, in allusive acts, a velvet necklace with a metal feather. ”
The organization says that “this is just the kickoff for ten days of dinners, ‘culinary conversations’, a ‘Praise to Port Wine’ and the Thinking Kitchen forum.
The event should involve “1500 meals and about three dozen chefs” from Oporto and other areas of the country, the result of “an unparalleled interest” that Paulo Amado claims to have met with agents contacted.
“There is no event in Porto that can be compared to this, for the quality of the agents involved, for the number of acts planned and for being addressed to the public,” says the organizer
The program includes a line dedicated to culinary routes and one of them, on the 25th, one of the taverns, with passage through icons from Porto such as Cervejaria Gazela, Casa Guedes and Conga, for 55 euros.
