For the past 25 years, every week has been Portuguese Restaurant Week for Manuel Azevedo, chef and owner of LaSalette and its sister restaurant Tasca Tasca in Sonoma, and now it’s official.
This week is California’s first official Portuguese Restaurant Week, which runs through April 28th. Mr. Azevedo is pleased to have promoted Portuguese culture and cuisine with every cup of caldo verde and plate of salt cod cake he has served over the years. It’s finally happening.
“I’m very excited. I think it will attract people who haven’t had much experience with Portuguese food and culture,” Azevedo said. “And they get exposed to the fact that there are Portuguese people around them. Portuguese people are very good at assimilating wherever they go. We just blend in.”
There are approximately 350,000 people of Portuguese descent in California, according to information provided by the Portuguese Trade and Investment Agency. The agency sponsors Portuguese Restaurant Week, which features eight participating restaurants ranging from Los Angeles to San Jose’s Little Portugal district to two restaurants in Sonoma and Azevedo as examples of the state’s best Portuguese cuisine. .
Sitting at a table painted in shades of blue found in Portugal’s famous ceramic tiles at Tasca Tasca, a more casual, small-plates-focused restaurant he opened in 2016, Azevedo explains how We talked about what made it onto this esteemed list. He calls his cooking style “Cozinha Nova Portuguesa” or New Portuguese Cuisine.
“I realized I needed to have one foot in California and one foot in Portugal,” he said of the cuisine, which is a direct reflection of his upbringing, rooted in one culture and raised in another.
Azevedo’s family immigrated to Sonoma County from the Azores, an archipelago off the coast of Portugal, when he was 2 years old. Like many Portuguese immigrants, his father Raimundo also worked in the local dairy industry. His mother, Ms. Lasaletto, cooked meals for her family of six, including fresh bread and linguissa, her homemade Portuguese sausage.
When Azevedo decided to open a Portuguese restaurant, he returned to Portugal and ate food from Lisbon to Porto, an experience he says left him dizzy.
“When I studied Portuguese cuisine, I found that the taste was great, but the way the food was presented and served in restaurants was very peasant-style,” he says. “We needed to improve our presentation to make it effective for our customers here in Sonoma.”
He found the answer in a spice mixture featuring paprika and cumin that his mother had used in Common Language.
“I’m going to use this as a kind of core flavor or starting point,” he remembers thinking. “We can take things that people are used to and give them a Portuguese twist, so it evolved from there.”
At La Salette, a fine-dining restaurant opened in 1998 and named after his mother, Azevedo uses spice mixtures in traditional dishes of pork and clams. It’s also the “secret” ingredient of baker Alicia Benitez, whose rolls are baked fresh every morning in LaSalette. This bread is a big hit with some customers and they come back to buy it for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.
Bread is such an important part of the Portuguese diet that Azevedo said he would never dream of charging customers for it. “To be a Portuguese restaurant, you have to have a lot of bread. At least that’s what my mother says.”
Combining Old World flavors with local ingredients gave Azevedo the freedom to create one of his most popular dishes: chorizo-crusted scallops with sweet potatoes and green onions.
“There were a lot of purist Portuguese diners who said, ‘No, no.’ This is not Portuguese.” As my father used to say, “Wrong, wrong, wrong. ”. But in my heart it is,” Azevedo said.
However, there are some dishes in which the chef does not deviate from tradition. One is pork and clams, the other is bacalhau no forno, or salt-roasted cod casserole, and caldo verde, considered one of Portugal’s national dishes.
This potato-based soup is a great way to enjoy Portuguese cuisine at home, he says. Most of the ingredients you need to make them are staple produce, like potatoes, leeks, and collard greens. Even Linguissa is now readily available at most grocery stores in the North Bay.
Mr. Bacalhau is more challenging, both in finding ingredients and preparing them, which Mr. Azevedo incorporated into his 2012 self-published cookbook, LaSalette. He encourages anyone who wants to learn more about Portuguese cuisine to cook it.
“There’s a certain amount of fussiness that goes into approaching that dish. Once you get the salt cod, you have to soak it for two or three days,” he said. “But if you can get past that, Bacalhau should be a challenge for everyone.”
