Escama – Sea Cuisine

Based in the centre of Porto, this beautifully made restaurant is everything you would want from a place of this manner. Most of the time when you head to the Ribeira, chances are you passed this place and thought to yourself, ‘this looks quite good’ and it really is eye-catching from the outside. Honestly, the food matches that quality too.
I always like to tell the honest truth about places where I have worked and I did have the privilege to work here for a few months. Actually, this is the place that caused the ultimate conundrum in my head regarding whether I wanted to work in kitchens or not, there is always a lot of factors when it comes to deciding that but what Escama caused for me was a whole other league of confusion. At a time when I was already tired of the kitchen dynamics, it provided me with the best team I had worked with, which goes long ways when you are working in a restaurant. Ultimately, I did choose to be on the outside of the kitchen but working here even for a few months was really memorable. 

See, Escama is a niche serving restaurant. Not everyone loves seafood. With the menu here being 90% seafood, having one meat dish and one vegetarian (usually), it easily establishes itself as to what kind of a restaurant it is and when you do get to a place like this to dine, you expect fresh seafood, Escama delivers on that. Every other day we were getting boxes of the fresh stuff in the morning and prepping it for either the lunch service or the dinner. In my experience, granted it wasn’t much, it was the first time I saw this kind of fresh prep. You know every restaurant has their own system of how they want to get the ingredients to the plate, Escama’s system, albeit hard work, was getting fresh food to the customer in its purest form with little to no flavour tampering. There were a lot of days we would run out of a particular dish because the ingredients didn’t arrive or weren’t enough. This applied not just to the seafood but also to every atypical ingredient, going from Chanterelles to Jerusalem artichoke to White asparagus. This is an easily solvable problem where you start freezing large quantities of food to be used on the upcoming days, which never became the case her and I loved that.

What you enjoy in the front on a plate surrounded by a somber ambience with hints of humbleness is easily reminiscent of all the handwork put into the food by the team in the kitchen. The kitchen in the early stages with only the head chef, 3 chef de parties and a guy in the plunge. It was truly a body-aching and kitchen establishing time. We served good food and honed a simple space into a well working kitchen. Talking about both the chef, Rafael Gomes and the sous-chef, Tiago Pinheiro, they created the most wonderful working environment in the toughest of conditions. For most of my days there, I never had a working fridge, had 3 boxes worth of ingredients to carry two storeys up every service, everyone had to work split shifts of 14 countable hours, at times, but both the chefs always held the morale super high.

We were always listening to the cheesiest songs ever (even disclosing them would be embarrassing), getting a couple of beers post lunch service and getting drunk after the dinner service. There was no time for other stuff but the work was extremely satisfying with us serving some beautiful food. I remember a day I was sick and received a video of the head-chef doing my work. He was doing the weirdest dance and taunting me for not being there. That is the kind of people we need in the back, the kind of fun laced passion and love towards food to make dishes that remind you of good times.

Coming to what I think of the value that the menu is working with. Is it the kind of place, you would want to come all the time? No and it doesn’t try to be that either. It is not cheap and the plates are not going to satisfy your hunger but it will satisfy your pallette. It is a place to be enjoyed on special occasions or if your pockets serve you well, you can come here anytime. When Escama first opened, when I was still there, we were working with a really complex menu, one dish took about 10 accompaniments, it was a bit too much at times but it was so much fun plating (not on the nights with a huge amount of covers. The tasting menu used to kill me because of how many things went on the plate for each of the 6 moments).

One of the examples was the Pregado (turbot) – It was cooked in sous-vide then finished on the grill, served with, now count with me, two forms of white asparagus, beurre blanc, caramelised baby onions, three forms of Jerusalem artichoke, chives, demi-glace with mustard seeds, charred pickled mustard leaves and god knows what else. I cannot remember if there was anything else. But you get the idea of what kind of plates I was dealing with and props to the chef’s creativity for coming up with such beautiful combinations. I loved every bite of that dish.

Now, Escama is hosting a simpler ever changing menu with a bigger team, so I assume everyone is able to handle the workload better. Although, the chefs still serve a unique tasting menu depending on the season with dishes like the aforementioned Pregado.

I won’t be eating there anytime soon but I definitely would return to see what the chef would be brewing. Depending on what the moment desires or whether you like seafood, you should give it a shot too.

P.s. The good images are from Escama’s instagram, so go check that out too — @escama.porto