José Avillez, chef at the Belcanto** (Lisbon), unravelled the cuisine of the host country at Gastronomika, Portugal, with his lecture 'Tradition and Modernity'. He is one of those responsible for updating Portugal's most traditional cuisine, a process that has not been easy, so much so that he distinguishes two stages: the first ten years, during which he even received threats in writing, because his compatriots thought he was destroying the country's cuisine; and another decade, during which they understood the importance of his work: "It has been a fun process, in which I have arrived at a cuisine of identity for the Portuguese and tourists, almost four times our population".

At Belcanto, he proposes a different way of looking at Portuguese cuisine, with memory and tradition as the starting point from which to lay the foundations for the future. The Cascais-born chef grew up on a farm with chickens, rabbits and ducks; his father was a hunter and fisherman, so he had close contact with produce from an early age. I learned about Portuguese geography through the product," he confessed.

I have always believed that tradition is also evolution, that it is possible to innovate while respecting all this identity", he affirms, and that is why "at Belcanto, for 13 years now, we have been reinterpreting tradition to create a more contemporary cuisine". The chef, who took his first steps in French kitchens and had a stint at El Bulli in 2007, says: "I grew a lot in those months and I think that Spanish chefs were the most responsible for my culinary evolution, but I always wanted to focus on a cuisine with a Portuguese identity, with its techniques, products and flavours.

In Portugal, however, the phenomenon of mass tourism has been taking place for some time now, and this has also changed Belcanto's everyday life: "We try to listen more and more to the customer, to get to know them better, to realise that the world has changed. Often our public has travelled, but they don't know our cuisine: we show them our traditions, but I try not to explain too much. It is a journey through our gastronomy," explains Avillez.

As the profile of the diner has changed, "we have the opportunity to show them what we do best. They often come without knowing Portugal and their first lunch or dinner is at Belcanto. It is a responsibility to introduce a country, a culture, in three hours. We convey the different regions through their flavours".

Different proposals

Avillez and his team prepared several recipes live, such as beetroot tartar with pine nut milk, "a memory from my childhood"; carabinero from the Algarve, "a product I love", with black cuttlefish ink, jowl ice cream and ash; Hake from the Azores, with a sauce of its bones and heads and cream, representing the soups of southern Portugal, with bread, grapes and an egg yolk; or suckling pig, "a product that we have always served but that has never stopped evolving". Now it is served with a stew of pig's trotters with coriander, a puree of orange peel that he learnt to make with Joan Roca, lettuce and soufflé potatoes.