Ricardo Costa is the chef at The Yeatman in Porto, Portugal, a kitchen with two Michelin stars that is dedicated almost entirely to Portuguese cuisine. I interviewed him for The Luxury of Attention.
When I spoke with Costa, he described his cooking as an act of transmission. The dishes exist to carry the quality and authenticity of Portuguese gastronomy, its fish, seafood and vegetables, while respecting the seasons and the places those ingredients come from. He went further, into what he sees as the chef’s responsibility to a traveler. A person who arrives in another country wants to understand its culture and traditions, and that understanding is what he sets out to deliver on the plate.
“When a person travels to another country, they want to understand the culture and traditions of that country and that’s what I aim to deliver.” Ricardo Costa, chef, The Yeatman
What I find instructive about Costa is the career he declined. He could have built a kitchen tuned to international fashion, French in technique, sourced from anywhere, designed for the camera. He chose Portugal instead, and that choice is the brand. The book is frank that the choice has a cost, since it meant passing up whatever faster recognition a more fashionable kitchen might have brought. Costa also gave me a useful account of how a kitchen stays true without standing still. Unless a recipe is perfect, he believes certain dishes need to evolve because the world has evolved, and he described that evolution as something that happens naturally rather than by decree.
In the book, Ricardo Costa appears in Chapter 11, Staying True, where his kitchen stands alongside the accounts of Rodolfo Guzmán and Eneko Atxa as an example of a brand built from substance rather than from marketing, and where his thinking on the natural evolution of a dish closes the chapter’s argument about protecting what is great while letting it change.
“People are different, food habits have changed, and concerns over food nowadays are different from those of the past. The evolution of a dish is something that happens naturally.” Ricardo Costa, chef, The Yeatman