Instinct, strategy, and the new Portuguese cuisine of José Avillez: “I started 24 years ago, when few chefs were offering contemporary cuisine in my country. No one expected the company to grow like this.” Today, the group is a well-organized brand with over 500 employees spread across 14 restaurants and a resort. What's more, the restaurants boast a total of four Red Stars and one Green Star.
José Avillez is a visionary chef and entrepreneur—one of the leading voices in contemporary Portuguese cuisine. From early on, he recognized the global potential of his country’s culinary heritage and has spent his career elevating it with originality and clarity. Raised in a modest household, he began cooking at seven, selling homemade cakes with his sister.
Raised in a modest household, he began cooking at seven, selling homemade cakes with his sister. After earning a degree in Business Communication, he trained in top kitchens across Portugal, France, and Spain—including with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli—before launching his own restaurants. Today, he leads a diverse group of venues in Lisbon, Porto, Cascais, Dubai, and Macau. Each one reflects a unique identity, evolving with time while staying rooted in tradition.
Personal evolution and mindset
For José Avillez, boldness didn’t come from certainty, but from necessity. What began as passion soon became strategy, even if the early years were driven more by instinct than formal planning. «Thirteen years ago, we followed an intuitive strategy—observing, adapting, trying to create dining options for different moments in people’s lives,» he recalls.
«I remember when we got the space for Cantinho do Avillez, my business partner said, ‘This is going to be a disaster.’ And I said, ‘Please trust me—I believe this has the perfect scale. I can do something special here. The gamble paid off. In just a few years, the restaurant grew 20 to 40 percent annually. Now we’ve achieved 100 times more than I could have imagined. Timing helped—we started 24 years ago, when few chefs were doing contemporary Portuguese cuisine. Even locals weren’t that interested. But over the past decade, the market has grown enormously.» As the brand expanded rapidly, the pace became unsustainable. A health scare eventually forced him to step back and rethink the structure of the business. «No one expected the company to grow like this. I remember after six years, investors told me, ‘We’ve built a great company.’ And it was true—but in the beginning, nobody believed it would work.»
Today, the group is a well-organized operation with more than 500 employees, spread across 14 restaurants and the luxury retreat Casa Nossa – The Lake Farmhouse. Much of the formal structure, he notes, was implemented in the past eight years. He also points to a broader shift in the national culinary landscape. The appetite for fine and creative dining has grown dramatically, alongside a tourism boom that changed the scale of opportunity. «In 2014, we had around 10–14 million tourists a year. Now it’s over 30 million. It’s a whole new game.» Looking back, he credits both vision and timing. «Early on, I told my business partners that Lisbon and Portugal would become global brands—when no one was talking about us.»
Avillez’s deep sense of urgency, may have its roots in childhood. After losing his father at the age of seven, he began to feel time as something finite—something that couldn’t be wasted. But the journey hasn’t been without hardship, and he wants the next generation to understand that success takes resilience. «Young chefs today sometimes see TV shows and think it’s easy. But they give up at the first problem.»
Ultimately, he believes lasting success comes from balance: guest satisfaction, team satisfaction, and investor satisfaction. «If that triangle works, everything else follows.» And while creativity fuels the kitchen, he knows numbers keep the doors open. Success in the culinary world, he believes, requires far more than creativity and passion—it demands financial sustainability. «Sometimes it’s hard to talk about money, because people want to focus on inspiration and creativity,» he says. «But if you don’t make money in restaurants, you lose all the rest. After 30 years of hard work, you need to come home with something more than just a big heart.» That pragmatic approach is matched by an unwavering commitment to improvement. «I’m sometimes a chef, sometimes a businessman. I can’t choose one,» he reflects. «I might spend years making a dish a certain way, and then one morning I could say: ‘Let’s change it.’ When the team asks why, I tell them: ‘Because I know we can do it better.’»
This same mindset extends to operations. «At Belcanto, we have 35 cooks and around 60 people in total. On some days, we serve up to 100 guests — when all order the tasting menu, that means more than 1,000 dishes leaving the kitchen. If you delay the first plate by even 10 seconds, and then each one by another 10, you lose the rhythm — you can’t serve the room.» To meet that demand with precision, the kitchen was designed with efficiency in mind. «We built the pass with two plating levels, because we didn’t have space for a larger one. So we adapted — we plate on two levels.» When Belcanto first opened, Avillez admits, «we had no expectation of a Michelin star.» Yet in that same year, it received its first. The second followed in 2014, and in 2015, Belcanto debuted on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, where it currently holds the #31 position.
It’s this dual identity—equal parts artist and strategist—that has driven him to continually evolve. Seven years ago, he committed to formal study, attending college three days a week for six months to learn economics and operations. He also attended Singularity University in Silicon Valley to deepen his understanding of emerging technologies shaping the future of the industry.
Culinary logic and creative process
That same precision carries into how he thinks about the physiological experience of dining. «I understand how we eat — the digestion,» he says. «A meal longer than two and a half hours, maybe three with dessert, is too much. I never serve meat more than two hours after the meal begins.» Timing isn’t just about logistics — it’s about how the body and palate respond. «We tease the palate with strong umami snacks — fresh, acidic, salty — like a flash in your mouth. The bread? That only comes after.» The texture plays a vital role — often delivering the surprise element that completes a dish. For him, texture is where sound enters the equation. «Texture is the way we involve audition. You close your eyes and hear your dish. The rest you already have: you touch, see, smell, taste — but sound? That only comes with texture.»
«I like to start the menu with more vegetables. As of now, at Belcanto we start with Beetroot in different textures, pine nut milk, and mustard seeds — completely vegan. When we first prepared it, I thought, ‘This is really special.’ It’s still on the menu today. We brought the dish to a culinary event in Cairo, where it caught the attention of a Phaidon editor — ultimately leading to a publishing deal for the upcoming Belcanto book.» Rather than following a fixed formula, his approach seeks to reflect the geography and emotion of Portugal itself. «I try to think about what Portuguese food is — not just traditions, but landscapes. Where I grew up near the ocean in Cascais, the Alentejo, the north, the woods — what people eat there, what reminds me of those places. We try to show that in our menu, like a trip inside the country.»
«The ‘Deep in the Sea’ dish, created back in 2007, is all about seaweeds — layers of seaweeds, really. For us Portuguese, most of us were born near the sea, so it’s something special. But for people who didn’t grow up with the ocean nearby, it can be a challenging dish. I know that maybe 30% of guests won’t love it — and that’s fine. Because I’m showing a very important part of Portugal, and part of my childhood. That kind of emotional expression, I couldn’t do with just three dishes on a menu. But I can do it with one, maybe two. Of course, taste is subjective — and everything you’ve lived up until now shapes who you are and what you’re ready to experience on the plate.» The majority of ingredients are sourced locally — about 90% Portuguese — but the menu also embraces discovery. «Now we’re buying Hamachi from Japan. And I think that’s also Portuguese,» he adds with a smile. «Because we used to travel around the world to find different things. Our discoveries now are this. And to maintain that Portuguese spirit, that openness, we bring that into what we serve our guests.»
«I think we’re always going to keep à la carte, because I don’t want to lose the 20% of guests who only eat à la carte. It also allows people who aren’t necessarily familiar with Michelin-starred dining to feel comfortable and welcomed. That includes Portuguese locals too. Last week, we had a guest dine with us for the 30th time this year — he’s Portuguese. So it’s essential that we continue to cater to those kinds of loyal guests. Ultimately, we have to think about what our guests want.»
Encanto, "a new Portuguese cuisine, but a vegetarian one.”
In 2022, he opened Encanto in Lisbon’s historic Chiado district, just steps away from Belcanto. The restaurant marked a new chapter—not just for his own portfolio, but for Portuguese fine dining. It became the country’s first Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant and one of the few in Europe. When Avillez began conceptualizing Encanto, he approached it as a painter might approach a limited palette. «I imagined I was a painter, and with a vegetarian restaurant, I’d have fewer colors to work with,» he explains. «So how do I transform those colors? The answer came through technique: working with seasonal vegetables, legumes, leaves, seeds, algae, mushrooms, flowers, fruits, eggs, and cheeses — building flavor through stocks, reductions, fermentation, and smoke. Saltiness, acidity, complexity, textures.»
«From its early days, Encanto has undergone a noticeable evolution. We started in a very different way than where we are now,» he says. «Nowadays we work together with the head chef—shaping the menu with both of our ideas.» What Encanto does not try to do is imitate meat. «I’m not trying to recreate the sensation of meat. I didn’t design this for vegetarians—I designed it for gourmets.» While it might have been easier to borrow heavily from countries with long-standing vegetarian traditions and spice profiles, he had a different vision. «I wanted Encanto to do what we did at Belcanto 13 years ago—start a new Portuguese cuisine. A new Portuguese cuisine, but a vegetarian one.»
