Miguel Rocha Vieira opens restaurant in Évora by the end of the year

Source: Time Out Lisboa

Since January, the chef has taken on the responsibility of developing gastronomic concepts for several hotels. In Évora, it will once again be more present in the kitchen. In January, after a troubled departure from Doca da Marinha, Miguel Rocha Vieira announced a change of life, full of will and ideas.

At AHM – Ace Hospitality Management, a hotel management company that belongs to the Mercan Group, he took on the responsibility of creating all the gastronomic concepts of the supervised hotels. And so it has done, one by one, making the restaurants a destination beyond the hotel, which serves the cities, from Amarante to Beja. It will be in Évora, however, that the chef will take over an independent restaurant. It's called Forno da Telha, it will have a creative cuisine, but with a traditional Alentejo base, and should open in the last quarter of this year.

"It will be the first restaurant opened from scratch completely separate from the hotel, which is in a building next door. We look at Forno da Telha as a street restaurant", he tells Time Out, visibly enthusiastic. "It's the first time I've worked in Alentejo, there's a lot I didn't know. It's one of those challenges that gives me a lot of joy, to be learning, to be discovering things", he continues, highlighting that he has been doing "a lot of research". "I've been trying to eat where I can and I'm talking to people of a certain age to try to understand how things were done and why because I want to try to bring it all to the table, respecting the tradition of Alentejo food."

It has been in the Alentejo that Miguel Rocha Vieira has spent much of his time, having inaugurated Chaparro Alentejano in August, as part of Holiday INN Beja. "We thought Beja needed a place like this. It's a traditional cuisine, but there we are not inventing anything, or giving personal imprints to anything. In Évora, we want to be bold. It will be a more fun thing, more out of the box", says the chef. "It will have my DNA, but the starting point is the essence of Alentejo cuisine."

Still under construction and with the menu being developed, the opening date of Forno da Telha is not closed, and it is certain that it will take place by the end of the year. "And we will have many wines, we have a large cellar with many wines from the Alentejo", he reveals, showing himself happy to have discovered a life beyond the kitchen.

Those who listen to him hardly imagine how Miguel Rocha Vieira has not stopped in recent months. He started by opening Pizzeria, at the Fontinha Hotel, with "Neapolitan pizzas, high and fluffy edge". "The products all come from Italy and it's going very well. We have a special affection because it was the first one we launched, in a place that was not so obvious", he confesses, leaving in the air the desire to scale the concept.

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