A good dish needs time to be prepared, and this dream needed three decades before it was just right and ready to illuminate the days of the city. The Oficina restaurant — previously existing as a workshop for restoring cars — is the materialisation of that which might be only the utopia aimed at by a man with a unique career in the world of Art in Portugal.

Art and gastronomy often seem to be distant cousins, but they still share many things between them. They adore appealing to the senses in the way that they happily comply with the creating of something new and different. Capacity for invention and aesthetic innovation are fields of art that are indispensible to good gastronomy. Maturing and the availability for letting time flow by are attributes of gastronomy that is not disdained by art.

Oficina will not only be a restaurant. It will be a space for a coming together; among traditional Portuguese cooking and artists available for reinventing dishes; among those who enjoy a good meal and those who cannot go without a good conversation. In friendly meetings around a table; in the so many corners in this open space.

The Oficina Restaurant accepts the desire to make a difference in becoming a place of note. Due to the way it has been able to respect the original outline of the building in which it is set and in the manner that it has managed to keep elements that define the building’s identity, such as the ironwork, the wood and the concrete.

The past is only of use as a base for the future. Starting from those memories, Oficina will try to find innovating crossings between the two passions of art and gastronomy.