About
Born in the
Borralho.
Not a word you'll find in most dictionaries. In old Portuguese kitchens — the kind with stone floors and a chimney wide enough to walk into — the borralho was the hearth. The corner where the fire lived. Fuelled by wood, by coal, by whatever the land gave. Where the chouriças hung to smoke. Where the family gathered in winter, and where summer's harvest became winter's sustenance.
It wasn't a cooking method. It was a place. The warm centre of the house.
That's where this kitchen comes from.
THE CHEF
Ricardo Paulo.
Cook, host, owner of the house.
Born in Coimbra, raised between the city and the Atlantic coast — the house near Mira, near Praia de Mira, where his grandmother cooked over a real fire and nothing came out of a packet.
He left. He cooked in Lisbon, in London, in Vienna. French kitchens, Nikkei kitchens, Peruvian, Japanese, Modern British, Israeli. Twelve years of technique borrowed from everywhere. Then he stayed in Vienna — and started thinking about what he actually wanted to cook.
I didn't want to recreate Portugal in Vienna. I wanted to cook the way Portugal always has — absorbing the world, without losing itself.
Portugal has been doing this for five hundred years. The piri-piri came from Africa. The bacalhau from the North Atlantic. The tempura — yes, Japan learned it from Portuguese missionaries. The Discoveries didn't just bring spices home; they changed what Portuguese cooking was. A culture of synthesis, long before that was fashionable.
Borralho is that, continued. Not fusion — never fusion. Perspectiva.
R.P.
WIEN
A tasca that wanders.
No fixed address. We cook wherever makes sense — someone's home, a gallery, a bakery that closes at night, a courtyard in summer. The place changes the dinner. The dinner changes the place.
Vienna · wherever we're called
Joining us for dinner?
There's always room for one more, if you ask in time.