At Octant Ponta Delgada, Chef’s Journey brings Duarte Eira, Ricardo Costa, Joachim Koerper and Cintia Koerper to the Azores for three dinners built around memory, mentorship, friendship and the encounters that helped define Paulo Leite’s culinary identity.
A chef’s story is rarely written only in recipes. It is also written in the kitchens where he learned, the people who demanded more of him, the friendships forged beside a stove and the flavors that remain in memory long after a particular service has ended. That is the premise behind Chef’s Journey, a new series created by Paulo Leite, Executive Chef of Octant Ponta Delgada, who will welcome four important figures from his personal and professional life for three exclusive dinners between October and November.
The journey begins on October 17 with Duarte Eira of Salpoente, in Aveiro. Although the two chefs have never worked together, Eira represents a connection to Paulo Leite’s origins and to the culinary landscape from which he emerged. For more than a decade, Eira has helped establish modern fine dining in Aveiro, elevating the products of the Ria—fish, shellfish, seaweed and, particularly, cod. His contributions will include an Aveiro oyster with tomato, balsamic and sea lettuce; cod loin with potato purée, pickled onion and pak choi; and smoked eel with crème fraîche, beetroot, wasabi and spices. Leite will complete the menu with dishes connecting those memories of origin to the cuisine he now creates in the Azores.
On November 14 comes a particularly personal reunion with Ricardo Costa of The Yeatman. Also from Aveiro, Costa gave Leite his first professional experience and introduced him to the discipline of haute cuisine—the precision, rigor and technical demands that would become foundations of his career. Leite describes him not simply as a professional reference but as a mentor toward whom he feels profound gratitude. Their dinner will therefore become a conversation between teacher and former apprentice, with dishes including Azorean squid with tagliolini, consommé and caviar, Royal de Atum 2025, and a dessert combining pineapple, yogurt and foie gras.
Chef’s Journey concludes on November 21 with Joachim Koerper and pastry chef Cintia Koerper, in a dinner shaped by friendship and the years they worked alongside Leite between 2015 and 2017. Here, memory becomes an ingredient in its own right. Dishes from that period are revisited rather than merely reproduced, allowing past combinations to acquire a new interpretation. Among them will be suckling pig with passion fruit, chosen partly because of its significance to Leite’s time with Joachim and its connection to the gastronomy of Beira Litoral.
The evening will also recover the celebrated “Barra de Ouro,” a foie gras terrine paired with Azorean pineapple, alongside spider crab with Azorean passion fruit and coconut, and skate with mushrooms and red-wine sauce. Cintia Koerper will create the desserts, including fermented Azorean pineapple and rice pudding with passion fruit, while wines from Herdade da Malhadinha Nova are expected to accompany the menu.
Across all three evenings, however, the real subject is not any individual ingredient. Each tasting menu has been conceived collaboratively to tell part of Leite’s biography: Aveiro and the beginnings of a vocation; the mentor who introduced him to professional rigor; colleagues who became friends; dishes carrying the memory of other kitchens; and finally the Azores, where those experiences have converged into the cuisine he now practices.
Chef’s Journey thus proposes something more intimate than a sequence of guest-chef dinners. It suggests that culinary identity is never created alone. Every chef carries other kitchens within his own—the corrections of a mentor, the generosity of a colleague, the flavor of home, the memory of a meal cooked years earlier. And sometimes the most revealing way to tell that story is not to write it down, but to place it on a plate.
Based on a story in Atlântico Expresso, Natalino Viveiros, director. The photos are also from AE.