Words: Teresa Castro Viana
As entrepreneurs, artisans and creatives, these women put everything they are into everything they do. From food to pastries to wines, they excel in their fields and outdo themselves every day, with boldness of spirit, hard work and merit, in a world that increasingly belongs to them.
Catarina Nascimento
A proud resident of Chaves and fierce defender of the Trás-os-Montes region, Catarina Nascimento, aged 40, returned to the city to open the 83 Gastrobar, a restaurant that is ‘humble and unpretentious, cosy and welcoming, with no secrets or tricks’. Up until then, she had worked in Vila Nova de Gaia, Madrid and Portimão, in Michelin-starred restaurants, after realising that her International Relations course didn’t suit her. ‘If I was going to have to work for the rest of my life, I might as well do something I really liked’.
So she set about creating 83 Gastrobar out of a small dream, which she achieved with a lot of hard work and some heartache along the way. ‘Nothing has been easy so far, much less guaranteed. As in other areas which are mostly dominated by men, there is still a long way to go, although many of the obstacles have already been cleared away’, she says.
Chefs like Marlene Vieira and Noélia Jerónimo are “trailblazers”, because of what they symbolise and what she hopes they will continue to achieve, but her list of female role models also includes Leonor Sousa Bastos, Joana Sousa, Carolina Caldeirinha and Lee Guimarães, and masters of bread and cake making, Joana de Melo Duarte and Maria Aguiar. ‘Due to changes in society, women have taken on positions that were previously unattainable, which means they have to work harder to show their worth. We have to prove that we’re good, that we’re strong’.
Inês Pando
She has always loved to eat and that is half the reason she fell in love with cooking, even though she didn’t have any training in the area and was a bit too lazy to cook at home. ‘It’s a pleasure for me to be at the table’, admits Inês Pando, 34. At Mafalda’s, in the Matosinhos Municipal Market, she got together with her sister Mafalda in 2015, picked up a saucepan and found the freedom to explore this world. She did work experience in London before the pandemic ‘to see how a professional kitchen worked’ and, over time, the business reinvented itself and the team, which is mostly female, acquired a new confidence. ‘We have our own specific ideas of what a working environment is and the women self-select to become part of this tribe’, she explains.
While on the one hand she criticises the ‘hyper-centralist institutions’ that don’t always recognise the significant women in the field — ‘when you’re in the north and you’re a woman, you have a double problem’ — on the other hand, she values her peers who ‘help and motivate’. She mentions Sara Roseira, from the organisation Simplesmente Vinho!, Lia Igreja and Tatiana Cardoso, from the world of cocktails, Lee Guimarães, ‘a force of nature’, Mirna Gomes, Aurora Goy, Lídia Brás, Monika Bloch, Catarina Garcias and Diana Barnabé, who she highlights ‘for all the work she has done to get women talking and claiming their rightful place’.
Verónica Dias
For Verónica Dias, 31, co-owner of Brites in Porto, bread was her launch pad into the baking and pastry business. ‘I started out in catering where everything revolved around bread: bread as a concept, as sharing, as a way of meeting’, she says. And she learnt how to do it in an unpretentious way. ‘I knew it was about fermentation without chemicals, without additives, but I didn’t know exactly what was happening there’.
In 2017, when she began to professionalise, other businesses popped up in the city, ‘in a very tentative way’, but her desire to learn was great. ‘I wanted to gain more knowledge and more technique, and I started studying independently’. Brites opened five years later with exactly that purpose. ‘I needed a stage that would allow me to have my own identity and complement the bakery and pastry shop’.
However, despite the success of the business and the fact that women have historically been linked to bread-making, there is still some resistance to associating Brites with a female head baker. ‘I’m constantly having to prove myself’, she says. She points to Aurora Goy, Lee Guimarães, ‘for her technique and sisterhood’ and to Ana Patrícia Correia, at the Marupiu Pâtisserie in Vila Nova de Famalicão, who gave up engineering to embrace pastry making. ‘For many people, this area is still the poor relation of cuisine and the end of the food chain’, she confesses.
Maria Aguiar
Maria Aguiar, 34, grew up in the Douro, in her grandparents’ house, the Quinta de Villa Franca, a ‘typical small wine grower’ in the region. She would stay there from early summer until autumn, with her parents and grandparents, closely involved with the grape harvest. Born in Porto, she studied law, practised in Lisbon and in 2017, when her grandfather died, decided that ‘this wine thing was going to have to be more than a hobby’.
She has had different professional experiences in the trade, did a postgraduate course in Wine Business, been involved in fairs and tastings, travelled in search of the best nectars and, in 2022, moved to the Douro to open Libatio, a wine bar with an eight-metre-long counter, in Peso da Régua. ‘I realised that I liked tasting a lot of different things, meeting producers, sharing wines with friends and telling stories about them’.
Along the way, she drew inspiration from many women: Liana Saldanha, Bruna Aguiar, Sílvia Macedo, Mariana Siqueira, Tânia Pita, Ivone Ribeiro, Madalena Vidigal, who she turns to ‘on aspects of wine tourism in Portugal’, Susana Esteban, Joana Maçanita, Vanessa Ferreira, Teresa Barbosa, Sandra Tavares da Silva, Joana Santiago, Teresa Caeiro and Mariana Salvador, for wines, and cooks such as Marcella Ghirelli, Francisca Passos and Liliana Alves, from Época, in Porto. ‘Women feed the whole world. In winemaking, whether it’s grape pickers or wine producers, women have always been involved and that’s why we’re here’, she says.
