PEDRO ALMEIDA: JAPANESE FOOD WITH PORTUGUESE SOUL

Pedro Almeida, executive chef at Midori in Sintra, Portugal, drew his earliest culinary inspiration from his mother. Many years later, this fueled a personal desire to please the palates of everyone who came to taste his creations. Almeida had also developed a love for Japanese food, which led to him soon building the foundations for what would become his special recipe for fusion cuisine, the first of its kind in Portugal. In 2018, recognition came in the form of his first Michelin star.

To what degree do the ingredients you use influence your menu offerings?

Local and fresh produce constitutes a major component of our menu. Even though Midori is a Japanese restaurant, we try to use as many Portuguese ingredients as possible in our cooking and naturally, our Portuguese roots have a great deal of influence on the flavors we create. Nevertheless, we also have a lot of exclusive products that are brought all the way from Japan just for us. Good examples of this are our Yakiniku dish, in which we use a very special pork meat from the Alentejo region in Portugal, cooked on a traditional Japanese Robata grill, and the Caldo Verde Miso soup, a traditional Portuguese soup recreated in a Japanese way. The Tuna Tataki, in which we incorporate almonds from my mother’s hometown, is another such example.

What or whom do you regard as your greatest influences?

I have been influenced by many different chefs, which is why, at Midori, we do not adopt a cooking style that is 100 percent traditional. However, nowadays social media and cooking books are my greatest sources of inspiration and creativity. It’s not difficult to get ideas from pictures and videos, and bring them to life. However, it takes a lot of time, effort, and a trial and error approach, to achieve perfect results.