Francisco Quintas: The Chef Behind Largo do Paço’s Michelin Star at Casa da Calçada, Portugal

Francisco Quintas was sixteen when he first worked a shift at Largo do Paço, the restaurant inside Casa da Calçada in Amarante, Portugal. He wasn't yet a professional, just a hospitality student picking up weekend hours under chef Tiago Bonito. It was a modest start, but it planted something. Not long after, he left Portugal alone for London, and the kitchen he'd return to years later, as its head chef, was the same one where he'd first learned to work a pass.

That London chapter took him through Chiltern Firehouse and Aquavit, and from there into some of Europe's most demanding kitchens: Boury in Belgium, three Michelin stars, De Librije in the Netherlands, also three starred, and Likoké in France, where he rose to sous chef. It was the kind of run that builds a chef properly, and when he returned to Portugal he had the pedigree to show for it. At 2Monkeys in Lisbon he won a Michelin star at twenty five, becoming the youngest Portuguese chef ever to do so.

The win didn't last. Four months later the restaurant's team fell apart, and Quintas found himself without a kitchen. What came next reads almost like it was always meant to happen. Casa da Calçada called with an offer for the job he had effectively been training for since he was sixteen. He took over Largo do Paço when the hotel reopened in 2025, and at the 2026 Michelin gala the star returned to the restaurant along with the guide's Young Chef of the Year award, given to him personally.

The Kitchens That Shaped Francisco Quintas

Quintas didn't inherit an unknown kitchen. Largo do Paço won its first Michelin star in 2004 under chef José Cordeiro and held it for most of the next two decades through a run of genuinely serious names: Ricardo Costa, who now runs the two starred kitchen at The Yeatman in Porto, Vítor Matos, André Silva and Tiago Bonito among them. The only reason it lost the star at all was logistics, not quality. The hotel closed for renovation in 2023, the restaurant went dark through the assessment period, and the distinction lapsed simply because there was nothing left open to inspect.

That history is what makes Quintas's appointment feel less like a fresh start than a continuation. This is a chef who came up through this exact kitchen, learning from some of the same names on that list, now leading it back to where it stood before the closure.

Inside Francisco Quintas’s Michelin-Starred Tasting Menu

The food backs up the story. Dinner opens on the terrace, in a glass walled room overlooking the river, with a glass of sparkling wine and an amuse bouche from the chef: small, colourful, deceptively complex dishes built with real textural range, meant less to fill you up than to signal what's coming.

From there, guests move through to the dining room proper, where a second aperitif is served inside the kitchen itself. It isn't just theatre. Watching the team behind each dish at work, rather than only tasting the result at the table, turns out to be as much a part of understanding the meal as anything that actually lands in front of you.

Quintas runs two tasting menus from there, thirteen or fifteen courses, both with an optional wine pairing, and he stays present throughout. He comes out himself to introduce individual courses, walk through where the ingredients were sourced, and check in on how the meal is landing, a level of attention that's consistently beyond what the format usually offers.

Recent menus have included a prawn dressed simply with buttermilk, dill and lemon, and a turbot course built around giant squid, caviar and bergamot, the kind of pairing that sounds unlikely on paper and makes complete sense on the plate.

Dinner tends to close with petit fours served inside a miniature model of Casa da Calçada itself, built to fold open at the table and stocked with nostalgic, almost childhood flavours rather than another round of straight technique. It's a playful way to end a meal this serious, and it says something about the kitchen: it isn't just chasing a star, it's chasing a memory.\

A Michelin-Starred Restaurant Worth the Journey to Amarante

None of this happens in a city with its own gravitational pull. Amarante is a small riverside town that was never going to compete with Porto or the Douro Valley for a spot on the itinerary, and it doesn't need to. Casa da Calçada, the palace hotel above the River Tâmega, is a destination in its own right, and Largo do Paço sits at the centre of it.

Some guests will book the hotel purely to dine at Quintas's table and stay the night because it happens to be there. Others will book the hotel first, for the setting and the rooms, and find that one of the best meals in Europe is simply downstairs. Either way it works out the same. It's a toss up, and a clear case of win-win.

For more on the hotel and the town, see our Amarante and Casa da Calçada feature article.