‘Old School Fine Dining is Over’: Top TV Chef says comfort is key

“You can take the girl out of France…” quips Chef Louise Bourrat as she orders a glass of champagne after a very busy service.

“But you have such nice Portuguese sparkling wines,” I venture. “Why do you want champagne?”

“I don’t know,” grins Louise. “Because of the way it sounds.”

Family photos abound in BouBou‘s arboretum-esque room in which one can immediately relax. It seems leagues away from the line of traffic that decorates the tiny street outside. We’re in Lisbon’s popular Príncipe Real neighbourhood, just a stone’s throw from the city’s Botanical Gardens and we have it here in miniature.

Plants spring from every surface, wall and ceiling in this family-run establishment and after a genuinely warm personal welcome from the kitchen team, the adventure begins.

TV Stardom

Half French and Half Portuguese, Bourrat shot to fame as the winner of the French TV show “Top Chef” in 2022. Her cuisine has been described as unique and irreverent, and her punky appearance and demeanour reenforce that. But this is still a work in progress, she admits.

“I’m still pretty young, so I’m still in a constant evolution of finding my identity,” she says.

But make no mistake. This is no newbie. She’s now turning thirty and has been running kitchens since the age of 21. And the maturity is fully in evidence with the dining experience.

What’s on the Menu?

The mackerel tart with dashi and thinly sliced carrots is a one-bite citrus bomb with cream like a cannoli.

The sardine with black aioli on a tuile biscuit truly fascinates. It works as traditional yet elevated finesse but it also betrays a sense of humour.

It encapsulates everything that needed to be encapsulated in one image. It’s so simple, it’s brilliant. You have history and elevation in one blink. A statement that is hard to beat in terms of its ability to wow you initially, immediately, and yet be packed with meaning.

“There’s a lot of work,” Bourrat explains. “It’s a complicated dish to make, especially to get consistency on it, because it has so much precision, but if you’re not precise enough, it can just look like it’s a five-year-old child that drew something.”

A city of little lettuces

This dish made its debut in June when the city is eating a lot of sardines and celebrating the Festas de Santo António a marking the life of the canonised alfacinha (a term referring to someone from Lisbon although it translated literally as ‘little lettuce’), St Antony, patron saint of lost items. Bourrat’s sardine will help ensure that this traditional fish never loses its place.

The vegetarian sweet potato ceviche with Lecce de Tigre and frozen lime kaffir from Japan is a firework, bursting with acid and bright lights while providing a chilli kick that sends your eyebrows a little higher than your facial structure expected.

The milk is sleek then cut by the excellent pairing from Ukrainian sommelier, Anastasia, of a blue slate Mosel Riesling. Gorgeous.

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The chef’s keenness to promote the vegetarian side of her repertoire was in evidence at this autumn’s Chefs on Fire event along the coast in Cascais where she cooked up Szechuan-style potato salad with smoked purée, burnt leek and baby carrots.

Back at Boubou’s, Hamachi from the Azores is paired with a Verdelho from the archipelago’s Pico Island made by 24 year old winemaker, Lucas Lopes Amaral.

It’s a delicious, sushi-style dish with the rice twist adding a prawn cracker feel while the ponzu acid sharpens the mouthful of succulent fat fish. The Verdelho doesn’t impose at all, rather its delicate volcanic character coats the melée in geography. 

A lightness of touch combined with a boldness of flavour, isn’t this fine dining?

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“Fine dining — the old school fine dining — is slowly, slowly dying,” says Bourrat. “There is so much of an abundance of new things that people are not so easily impressed anymore. So in order to really thrive, you need to be extremely good. I don’t think that that many places are actually hitting the mark or no longer hitting the mark. Not because they are not good, just because people have a much wider range of experiences. Because they’re not shocking maybe, they’re not surprising enough.”

Tourism and money

Maybe it’s also a price point problem. Lisbon is suffering from tourists not having as much disposable cash as they did in recent years. Footfall is still healthy, they are still coming, but the numbers don’t translate into the expected revenue as more and more of them stay in their airbnb instead of touring the city’s eateries. But if you crave a high level of cooking, 7 courses at Boubou’s is just under the 100 euro mark, making it comparatively very reasonable.  

Bourrat’s Ox Tongue dish is the banner-waver for keeping it real. “It’s the memories of our grandmothers,” she tells me. It is marinated first then slow cooked in broth and served with smoked eel in a tarragon-heavy ravigote sauce and a beef consommé filled with “spices that grandma used to use like cinnamon and mixed pepper.” 

Anastasia’s pairing is so clever here. The slight offal tinge is thrown into a rustic kaleidoscope with the tarragon and the medicinal hints from a lengthily-macerated and complex Georgian wine: A sulphuric nose with acacia, plasticine and wax and a palate brimming with nectarine and notes of elderflower and peat. This bewildering medieval soup is a cuvée called Iago. Made from the Chinuri grape, it stays six months on the skins.

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More tradition is adhered to with Bourrat’s take on the classic pork and clam dish, Carne de Porco Alentejana. She uses black pork from Portugal’s Alentejo region, cured first with salt and sugar then cooked sous vide.

Smoked bonito flakes give the mayonnaise a Japanese feel and coriander oil is added (which is always served with the traditional dish). Bourrat adds blood orange and mustard seeds to achieve table-thumping tastiness with just the right amount of salt to titillate. 

The clam sounds a little jarring to the uninitiated but rather like a beef with anchovy dish I had in Bordeaux once, it provides textural complexity as well as natural salinity. It’s bold and fun.

Girls just wanna…

“Chefs from my generation still want to do fine dining, but they no longer want the white table cloths and stuff,” Bourrat insists. “They want to be able to put on loud music and wear Doc Martens. We still want to have fun, you know.”

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There’s definitely something maverick about infusing panna cotta cream with CBD but the addition of caramelised pistachio, fresh and pickled apples, cucumber and shiso leaf granita shows a deftness behind the renegade punk. But the focus here is on feeling comfortable and looked after.

“Some of the classic three-star places, even from the moment you step in, you feel like you don’t belong already. It’s like the amount of money that you’re dropping on the table, you’re supposed to feel comfortable, but it’s the opposite. You want to feel like you’re a superstar. That’s what you need to feel like. We don’t want people to feel pressure that they are not properly dressed or they are being too loud,” she explains.

We finish with the dish that made her famous on French TV. Black garlic and miso ice cream with chocolate, shiitake, and truffle crumble with a buckwheat cracker.

It is of course a total tour de force from this charismatic chef. Oodles of umami wrapped in chocolate familiarity and a depth of flavour to intertwine with the myriad tones of Anastasia’s Madeira, a winning match.

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Where’s Michelin in this?

On the topic of accolades, Bourrat isn’t such a renegade that she rejects them. A mature renegade perhaps?

“We’re trying but I don’t obsess over it. I don’t get mad at it. If it doesn’t happen right away I will be okay,” she says.

“Something that I learned in Top Chef that was very, very useful: to mentally keep going until the end. The only thing that you can do that is in your power is to do your best. The rest it is not up to you.”