It's our pleasure. Thank you for coming.

It didn't enter my life — I was born in a pot. That's how I always start my interviews.

You know Obelix and Asterix? I'm that Obelix who was born in the pot.

I come from a family that loves food. We go to sleep thinking about what we'll have the next day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's a very serious question in our family.

On top of that, my mother was one of the first female chefs in Lebanon and one of the most influential women chefs of her time in the Middle East.

So when I opened my eyes to this world, it was obvious to me. Food is my passion. It's my life. It's part of who I am.

I don't really separate my personal life from my professional life. For me, everything revolves around food, hospitality, and restaurants.

Absolutely.

If a cuisine has soul, it has to come from somewhere — from childhood memories, emotions, experiences, and all the things connected to food. And, really, most things in life are connected to food.

I find it interesting that when chefs talk about their influences, they almost always mention their grandmother or their mother. It's often female figures who appear at the center of those stories.

For me, it's exactly the same.

Yes, it is.

In Lebanon, children often have nicknames. My name is Cynthia, and it gradually became Cynthia, Sinta, Touta, Balouta — a whole chain of affectionate nicknames.

When we were deciding on the restaurant's name, everyone around us kept saying, "Why don't you call it Touta?" Because it's your cuisine, your world, your story that you're inviting people to discover.

So that's how it happened.

It's actually a beautiful story.

We're Lebanese, and we already had a well-established catering business in Lebanon. But I reached a point where I felt I needed a new adventure.

I had heard a lot about Portugal, so I came to visit. Very quickly, I felt at home. Lebanon is a small country, and in some ways Portugal felt familiar.

We came to Lisbon and started doing market research. At first, I didn't fully understand the dynamics of the city or the market. I kept wondering why there were so many opportunities and so much potential.

My background allowed me to do many different things — pastry, restaurants, hospitality — so we were somewhat lost about which direction to take.

Then we found this space.

We spent days and nights walking through Lisbon, trying to understand the city. When we came across this place, it felt as if the space itself showed us the path.

That's how Touta was born.

From the beginning, it felt obvious that it should be a marriage of Lebanese roots, French technique, and Portuguese produce.

Yes, although the concept has evolved.

We're now entering our third year, and with time comes maturity. We understand the culture better, we've developed stronger sourcing networks, and we've learned more about the country.

One of the first challenges was sourcing products. We wanted to work with Portuguese ingredients while also bringing certain products directly from small Lebanese producers.

As the years pass, things become clearer. Some aspects of Portuguese cuisine naturally enter your way of thinking.

That said, I would never claim that I cook Portuguese cuisine. I don't allow myself to say that.

What I do is express my own vision of the Portuguese ingredients and traditions that inspire me, transforming them into something that is always a conversation between Lebanese culture, Portuguese culture, and whatever else inspires me at the moment.

First of all, Lebanese cuisine is still relatively new in Portugal.

Beyond that, people who know Lebanese food often associate it with street food — something quick, casual, something you grab when you're hungry and move on. They don't necessarily see it as a cuisine that can offer a refined experience built around quality, hospitality, and storytelling.

That was exactly what we wanted to showcase.

At the same time, I'm not doing traditional Lebanese cuisine. And Lebanese cuisine itself has two distinct worlds.

What you eat in restaurants in Lebanon is not what you eat at home. Even if you're a tourist visiting Lebanon and dining in restaurants every day, you won't necessarily discover what Lebanese families eat around their own tables.

They're almost two different cuisines.

At Touta, what you experience is closer to what we eat at home. It's the intimate cuisine of everyday life, combined with what inspires me while living in Portugal.

It's also a way of giving back to the country that welcomed us, which is very important to me on an ethical level.

And then, of course, there is everything I've learned throughout my own journey in cooking.

Sometimes I can't even explain exactly how a dish comes to life. That's why cooking is magical. It's like music. It's like painting. It's an art.

In restaurants, it's often about mezze, grills, sharing plates, and barbecue.

At home, it's different.

You come back from school or from work and there's a comforting pot waiting for you. It's home cooking — dishes that take time, dishes prepared with care, dishes that carry the love of a mother or a grandmother who has been cooking all day while waiting for you to come home.

We have many vegetarian dishes as well as dishes with protein, but they all require patience and time.

Many of the dishes at Touta are actually some of my favorite dishes from childhood. They're dishes I loved coming home to after school.

In a way, I'm sharing some of my happiest memories.

Every dish on the menu has a reason to exist.

Every dish begins with a story, an emotion, or a memory.

One of the first dishes I knew had to be on the menu was inspired by something I used to eat with my father.

Traditionally, it's a simple breakfast dish: sunny-side-up eggs with sumac, garlic, mint, and olive oil.

At Touta, I transformed it. The egg became a perfect egg, the flavors became an emulsion, and I built the dish around sautéed mushrooms.

But at its core, it's still the memory of sharing breakfast with my father.

It's my way of sharing an intimate moment with our guests.

Another example was a dessert we served inspired by autumn in Lebanon.

It featured an ice cream made with arak, our national spirit — a grape distillate flavored with anise — together with figs and a crisp tuile.

The dish came from a memory I cherish deeply.

Autumn in Lebanon is beautiful. We would gather around long tables under grapevines, spending entire afternoons together. We'd pick figs, drink arak, eat, talk, and stay there from lunch until dinner.

The food would keep arriving. The conversations would continue. The figs would appear in different forms throughout the meal.

It's one of my favorite memories.

One day, a Lebanese guest tasted that dessert and immediately started crying.

For us, that's the greatest achievement possible.

When someone understands exactly the emotion you're trying to translate into a dish — when they feel the same thing you felt — that's incredibly powerful.

Exactly.

I don't see myself as simply serving food.

What I'm really sharing is my personal journal.

You know those intimate journals we keep when we're young? That's what my cooking is.

I'm opening that journal and sharing it with people.

And through those dishes, I hope to communicate feelings, emotions, memories, and soul.

It's not easy. Especially when you're not Portuguese.

It's a constant search.

You move from one recommendation to another. You visit markets. You travel. You observe. You keep researching.

Then comes the second step, which is introducing yourself.

You need producers to understand that you're serious. These are sensitive people and incredibly hard workers. You don't earn their trust overnight.

You have to build relationships slowly.

They need to understand who you are, that you're committed, that you respect their work, and that you're genuinely interested in the story behind what they produce.

It takes a lot of patience.

That's a difficult question.

No, I don't think there is one ingredient.

Every dish should have a hero ingredient, but that ingredient changes depending on the season, the availability, and what I discover.

What inspires me is falling in love with an ingredient.

Once that happens, I start building a dish around it.

The ingredient becomes the source of the story.

For me, they're connected. Recognition comes naturally if people are sensitive to what you're offering. Everything starts with emotion, soul, and intention. Some people connect with that immediately, and I hope many do. Others don't, and that's perfectly fine. You can't please everyone. As long as I continue doing what I do with all my heart, that's what matters.

That's a very important question.

My background is rooted in French culinary training, and for me the foundations are essential. Once you truly master the fundamentals — when they become second nature — that's when your mind can begin to play. If you're still learning the basics, you're not yet completely free.

I know there are different schools of thought, but personally I have enormous respect for the knowledge that has been passed down through generations and centuries.

I feel gratitude for what I've learned.

And once you've reached a certain level of maturity, your responsibility is to explore, reinterpret, and evolve while respecting the DNA of a cuisine. You can play with it. You just shouldn't betray it. That's what matters to me.

No, it happened very naturally.

Everything in this place happened naturally. The Merceria exists because preserving food is an essential part of Lebanese culture.

Of course, it's not unique to Lebanon. Every culture has its own traditions of preservation and fermentation — Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, French, Portuguese, Scandinavian.

For centuries, people preserved food because they had no refrigerators and no year-round access to ingredients.

Lebanon has a particularly rich preserving culture. We call it the mouneh. The Merceria is our way of showcasing that tradition. It's about showing how ingredients evolve throughout the seasons, how they transform, and how they can be appreciated beyond the moment they are freshly harvested.

It's an important part of our culture, so it felt natural to make it part of the restaurant experience. People love the space because it evokes something familiar. It reminds them of grandparents, family homes, and traditions.

And that's exactly the feeling we hoped to create.

Thank you. It was lovely. A pleasure.