Private chef · Casa Duarte supper club
Fourteen years in restaurant kitchens, now cooking for twelve people at a time in my own dining room — and in yours. Portuguese food that leans on the market up the road, not on nostalgia.
I cook two things. Once a month my dining room in Graça becomes Casa Duarte: twelve seats, one long table, six courses and a lot of wine from the Douro. The rest of the month I cook privately — dinner parties, small weddings, a birthday where somebody wants the food their grandmother made, but better.
The cooking is Portuguese but it is not a museum. Whatever the fish counter at Mercado de Santa Clara has that morning decides most of the menu. I buy whole animals, I use the whole animal, and I would rather serve you a perfect grilled carapau than something with tweezer marks on it.
If you have a grandmother’s recipe you want cooked properly, bring it. Those are my favourite jobs.
Graça, Lisbon
A twelve-seat supper club in my own apartment, one Saturday a month, plus private cooking across Lisbon and the Setúbal peninsula.
Cais do Sodré, Lisbon
Ran the fish section, then the pass, in a 45-cover taberna cooking modern Portuguese food over charcoal.
Porto
Northern Portuguese cooking — the broths, the bread, the slow-braised things.
Viana do Castelo
First kitchen. Where I learned to fillet properly and to clean as I go.
Cuisines
In the kitchen
Cooked around
A whole Bísaro pig from Trás-os-Montes, cooked six ways across six courses, with Douro reds throughout. €75. Two seats left.
The Christmas Eve table a fortnight early — bacalhau cozido, couve, rabanadas, and far too much of it. €70. Sold out, waiting list open.
Six soups, six courses, one very long winter table. Caldo verde, açorda, sopa da pedra, and three you will not have had. €60. Booking opens 15 December.
Everything the Santa Clara counter has that morning, grilled over charcoal on the balcony. €85. Booking opens 12 January.
The first favas, the first grelos, lamb from the Alentejo. €75. Booking opens 9 February.
A real enquiry, lightly shortened, shared with permission.
Hi! My partner’s 40th, 14 people, our flat in Estrela, Saturday 21 March. Is that something you do?
Yes — 21 March is free, and fourteen is a good number for a home kitchen. Three things I need before I can quote you properly:
Four burners, a normal oven. One coeliac, two vegetarians. Seated — we can just about fit fourteen if we borrow a table.
Then I would suggest five courses rather than six, so nothing is waiting on the oven. Coeliac and vegetarian menus are cooked as their own dishes, not a plate with things taken off it — that is included, never an extra charge.
For fourteen seated, five courses, I would be €68 per person including all the shopping, plus €120 for a second pair of hands on the night. You buy the wine and I will send a list. I arrive at 15:00, we eat at 20:00, and your kitchen is cleaner than I found it by midnight.
That is exactly what we wanted. Where do I send the deposit?
Private dinners across Lisbon, Sintra and Setúbal. I usually reply the same evening, and I book about two months out.
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