Belcanto

Section 1·Anomaly in the Shadow

Portugal has long existed in the shadow of Spain within the Michelin universe. Spain counts more than ten three-star restaurants nationwide; Portugal has none at that level, and two stars is effectively the ceiling. Against that backdrop, Belcanto stands as something of an anomaly. Tucked into a narrow lane off São Carlos square in Lisbon's Chiado district, beside the national opera house, the restaurant occupies a building that opened as a gentlemen's club in 1958. José Avillez took it over and renovated it in 2011, reopening in early 2012. A Michelin star followed that same year; a second came in 2014, making Belcanto the first restaurant in Lisbon, and Avillez the first Portuguese chef, to reach that level.

Section 2·Avillez's Formation

Avillez did not come up through culinary school. He studied business communication, trained under Maria de Lourdes Modesto, one of Portugal's foremost authorities on traditional cooking, and subsequently passed through the kitchens of Alain Ducasse and Eric Fréchon in France. The defining turn came in 2006, when he joined elBulli's creativity department under Ferran Adrià. He has described that period as the moment he learned not to fear doing something new. The culinary language at Belcanto, which lays modern technique and at times an Asian touch over Portuguese ingredients and sensibility, was built naturally on that background.

Section 3·Why Belcanto

The decision to visit came from the 2023 World's 50 Best Restaurants ranking, announced during preparation for this trip. Belcanto had climbed to 25th, the best result ever for a Portuguese chef. At 24th was Septime in Paris, which I had already visited; the memory of that meal was still fresh, so my interest followed naturally. I had planned to close the dining on this trip with Deessa in Spain, but ending there felt as though it would leave something wanting, so I added Belcanto to the last evening of my four days in Lisbon. The reservation was for the Chef's Table, a separate arrangement inside the kitchen rather than the main dining room. To give the conclusion first, it was one of the best choices of the whole trip. Even though I was not in good shape that day, there were many dishes I thought delicious, and three months after the visit the flavours of that evening were still vivid. I will also confess that World's 50 Best, which I had been somewhat doubtful of, went up a little in my estimation, with Belcanto as the turning point.

Section 4·The Walk, the Seat

That evening, after taking in the view from São Jorge Castle, I walked to the restaurant. Follow a single-lane alley that goes dark once the sun sets, and you come to a plain old building bearing the nameplate 'Belcanto', its wall filled with awards.

As soon as I sat down, warm from the walk, I ordered a glass of Champagne Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé first. The menu was already fixed, so the only decision to make that day was whether to take the pairing. One of my goals for this trip was to try the pairing at every restaurant, and since this was my only fine dining meal in Portugal, I chose the pairing.

For a while after sitting down, though, I could not focus on the food. I could not take my eyes off the setting and everything happening around me. Alongside the main dining room, Belcanto offers a Chef's Table available by separate reservation at a higher price, situated inside the kitchen itself. Guests pass through the dining room and enter directly, where a table for five or six has been set up. Unless you work in the industry, you rarely get the chance to see how the kitchen of a Michelin restaurant runs, and that day my seat was right in the middle of one.

Belcanto's kitchen is divided into two sections: one side handling amuse-bouches and appetizers, the other managing fish and meat mains. Avillez works the main station, checking every dish as it goes out. Early in the meal, my eyes were caught by both kitchens in full swing, and I could not give the food my full attention. As I entered the kitchen and raised my camera, Avillez stopped working, said, 'Take one of us too,' and posed with his arm around another chef's shoulders.

For more than three hours after that, he checked every main course as it went out, and several times I watched him dash into the kitchen to fix a sauce he was not happy with and come back out. It was a scene I wanted to keep as a VR video. A Korean chef working at Belcanto told me that in more than a year there, I was only the second Korean guest at the Chef's Table.

Section 5·The Opening

The amuse-bouche arrived on a branch-shaped rack, four pieces to be taken in clockwise order from the green: Crunchy Seaweed, barnacles, codium / Charcoal crisp with roasted sardines and rosemary ash / Minced sea prawn from Algarve with roasted chicken skin / Foie gras full moon and Port. The pairing opened with NV Nicolau de Almeida Porto Leve Seco, Douro, a white Port. Spanish restaurants tend to introduce fortified wine around the second course; here it arrived from the first glass.

It suited all four pieces reasonably well. The Algarve prawn with chicken skin made the strongest impression, followed by the charcoal crisp with sardine. By the end of the amuse-bouche, I had a feeling that tonight would not be a failure.

Section 6·The Sea

Only after the amuse-bouche did I take my eyes off my surroundings and start to focus on the meal. The second course was Smoked and cured horse mackerel, Algarve carrot and emulsion: horse mackerel lightly smoked, accompanied by carrot and emulsion, tasting exactly as it looked, with a notably resilient texture. That said, it is always my complaint that raw fish in European restaurants comes no bigger than the top joint of a thumb, and this was no exception. The pairing was 2021 Ameixambar, Açores, from vineyards on a volcanic archipelago 1,600 kilometres west of Lisbon.

Around this point, the thought began to harden that, for whites, Portuguese wine suits my personal taste better than Spanish.

As the meal moved into its middle stretch, centred on seafood and vegetables, each dish hit harder, enough to bring to mind Ao in Tokyo, which I had visited that April. The European Lobster Caesar Salad drew my first real gasp of admiration. The lemon's acidity came as ice crushed as fine as shaved ice, and the moment it entered the mouth with the leaves, lobster and sauce, an unexpected harmony opened up.

In a fine dining menu, salad had always been a course I would eat when served but never preferred. A salad like this, though, I would want to see given a place in every menu. Personally, it was the best salad I have ever eaten. The pairing was 2022 Filipa Pato "Nossa Calcário", Bairrada, a Portuguese wine from a region between Lisbon and Porto, but I was so focused on the salad that I have no memory of the wine.

In a fine dining menu, salad had always been a course I would eat when served but never preferred. A salad like this, though, I would want to see given a place in every menu.

Section 7·The Center

Next came The Garden of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, a showy dish of soft-boiled egg topped with edible gold leaf. It had a Japanese touch, with the savour of soy sauce or katsuobushi, and came with mushrooms. If the Caesar Salad had been so striking that I had no memory of its pairing wine, this time it was the reverse: the wine hit so hard that the dish itself was pushed out of my memory.

The wine was 1984 Caves São João, Porta dos Cavaleiros, Dão. It caught my eye the moment it was brought in, in a bottle that was not a standard 750ml, and the 1984 vintage raised my expectations considerably. It was amber, and fruit nuances and a nutty aroma rose from the glass. Once I drank it, though, a strong metallic taste came through. I could not tell whether it was a storage problem or the character of a long-aged white, but set against my expectations it was quite a letdown.

What blew that disappointment away in one go was Scarlet shrimp curry, cauliflower and green apple.

Grilled prawns came with a sauce and a garnish of green apple, and the sauce beneath them in particular was the best I can remember. It was an Asian-touch dish carrying the spice sense of Thai cooking. More than a few dishes with Asian touches in Europe have left me unable to suppress a wry laugh, but this one was so good I would call it the very essence of the approach. The strength of the spice was exactly right, and I felt it would still have been delicious had it gone even more Thai. The grilling of the prawn was faultless too. The Lobster Caesar Salad and this dish vied for the title of the evening's best. If this dish appears on the menu during any future visit to Portugal, it alone would justify returning to Belcanto.

The pairing was 2008 Soalheiro Primeiras Vinhas, Vinhos Verdes. Portuguese whites suited the seafood courses well throughout the evening. At a market in Porto earlier in the trip, picking seafood from a display to eat off a disposable plate with a one- or two-euro glass of wine had been a pleasure as well, and it is a shame that Portuguese wine is so hard to find in Korean wine shops.

If this dish appears on the menu during any future visit to Portugal, it alone would justify returning to Belcanto.

The fish main was hake, a cod-like fish common in Europe, served with caviar and grape. On the menu they handed me in an envelope after the meal, it was listed simply as 'Hake'.

The taste was unexceptional, nothing beyond the serviceable. The pairing, 2020 José Avillez & Niepoort, Douro, was a collaboration wine bearing the chef's own name.

Two meat courses followed. The first was Squab and pastel de massa tenra: pigeon with minced pigeon meat inside a small fried pastry, a Portuguese preparation served within a hollow bread casing.

The sauce and garnish were both well executed, and the bird had neither the gaminess nor the dryness that tends to cause hesitation on a first encounter. The first time I ate pigeon I was quite worried, but it has since become an ingredient I look forward to. If you eat adventurously at home, I recommend ordering pigeon at least once in Europe.

The second meat course was Suckling pig with orange peel purée and lettuce, and it was the best dish of the evening. Skin and flesh cooked together in a square portion, the exterior crisp, the interior moist. Two sauces accompanied it: one acidic, which cut through the fat when taken with lettuce, and the richer one, eaten with the meat, reminded me of a suckling pig barbecue. Given the choice between the Squab and this dish, the pig. Drinking it with the pairing, 2008 Quinta da Vacariça Garrafeira, Bairrada, I became convinced that, for my own taste, I prefer Spanish reds to Spanish whites and Portuguese whites to Portuguese reds. Then is France the best at both?

Section 8·The Close

Dessert opened with the Smoked Ham Ice Cream Sandwich: cream ice cream between two cookies, topped with caramel and jamón. Ice cream and cookie, with the savour of jamón and then caramel on top: a good thing made even better. It confirmed once again that jamón goes well not only on its own but with ice cream and on pizza too. In Europe a pairing naturally runs on to a dessert wine, and perhaps because I had grown used to that, when I dined in Japan and Korea not long ago I missed having a dessert wine in the pairing.

The dessert wine was NV Villa Oeiras Superior, Carcavelos, from the Lisbon coast, in a bottle not shaped like a standard wine bottle.

The second dessert, Strawberry with whipped cream and olives, was more conventional than the first in construction, but the pairing of olive with strawberry and cream carried novelty, and as a palate-closing course it succeeded.

The pairing was 2019 Aneto Colheita Tardia, Douro Colheita. I had taken it for a Port aged from a single vintage, so I was surprised when it came out white. Colheita Tardia, it turned out, means late harvest: this was a late-harvest white from the Douro, not a Port.

The final dessert, Sunflower, was shaped like the centre of a sunflower head. The flavour was ordinary. Even so, I wanted to rate Belcanto highly for never slackening across the whole menu and keeping up visual interest and variation to the very last moment. The petit fours were the same: real stones and stone-shaped chocolates arrive together, and the staff tell you in advance which are the real stones.

Near the end of the meal, I asked Avillez for a photograph. It was past eleven at night. He personally called Pastry Chef Américo dos Santos over from across the kitchen and posed for the photograph with a broad smile, no less.

When the meal was over, I wanted to congratulate my past self, the one who months earlier had hesitated over booking Belcanto and booked it anyway. The impact of each dish was so strong that Ao in Tokyo, which I had visited that April, came to mind again. That Portugal has no Michelin three-star restaurant is a fact that becomes difficult to understand after a meal here. Measured by the food alone, this was the highest point of the trip.