“How do you like the chilled red?” On a recent Saturday night, chef Nuno Mendes was working the dining room at Cozinha das Flores, his new restaurant, attached to the Largo, a new 18-room luxury hotel near the Douro River in Porto, Portugal.
Mendes splits his time between Portugal and London, where he rose to fame in the kitchen of the Chiltern Firehouse, but he’s spending a lot of time in Portugal these days. It’s a homecoming of sorts—he grew up in Lisbon, but during a heroin epidemic he left for the United States at age 19. “I knew there was no future for me in Portugal,” he says. “I was seeing my friends dying.”
