When I spoke with José Avillez, he was chef of Belcanto in Lisbon, Portugal.
Avillez was among the eighty hoteliers and chefs I interviewed for The Luxury of Attention. The book draws on all of those conversations, though not all of them are quoted on the page. Some did their work in the background, confirming a pattern I was seeing elsewhere or giving me a sharper sense of how a particular discipline is practiced at the top of the field. His conversation belongs to that group. What he told me about leading a kitchen in Lisbon informed the synthesis that runs through the chapters on the team, the creative act and the pursuit of perfection, even where his name does not appear in the text.
On these pages I quote only what the book attributes to a person directly, so there is no quotation here. Readers who want to see the arguments his conversation helped me form will find them in the Field Guide lessons linked on this page, and in the question pages drawn from those chapters.