To all appearances, Primavera Cafe Restaurant on East Street in the center of Ludlow could be tucked away in a quiet square in just about any southern European city or town. But it’s owner and chef Jack “Rocha” Nuno who makes the picture perfect.
Nuno is the epitome of the stubborn, prickly European chef whose single-minded focus on achieving culinary perfection and serving as a faithful standard-bearer for his native traditional cuisine is ultimately an expression of love and good will on offer to anyone, and particularly to those who can truly appreciate it.
“He never serves a plate that he wouldn’t eat himself,” my translator, Nancy Teixeira, says, paraphrasing her boss’s words, “and he only cooks what he likes.”
Such confidence—in his own palate and in his simple, direct and utterly committed approach—might seem the product of a lifetime spent in the kitchen, of a passion ignited in childhood and fanned through years of apprenticeship and gradual rise within the profession. The reality is, Nuno didn’t get his start until he was nearing middle age, after spending the earlier part of his life in a variety of careers without even a remote connection to food.
Born Joaquim Rocha Nuno and known to many simply as Rocha (“rock” in Portuguese), the chef was first a military man, serving Portugal as an army sergeant in Angola, where he remained after the army to work for a diamond mining operation. A decade later, he returned to Portugal, where, among other jobs, he worked as a car salesman. It seemed that whatever he turned his attention to, Nuno learned quickly and was soon successful.
In his early 40s he bought his first restaurant, Patio da Rainha (The Queen’s Patio), in the medieval town of Obidos, 45 minutes from Lisbon. While he owned and operated the successful restaurant, he hired someone else to do the cooking.
Despite his success in Portugal, Nuno felt limited by the stagnant national economy of the time and set his sights on the Unites States, immigrating in 1989 at the age of forty-four. Arriving first in New Jersey and moving quickly to New Bedford, a coastal city with a large and vibrant Portuguese-American population, Nuno found work in a Portuguese restaurant—an apprenticeship that, typically for Nuno, lasted only a few months.
“Some of the Portuguese businesses in Ludlow delivered to restaurants in New Bedford,” Nuno explains through Teixeira. In two months’ time, Nuno had gained a reputation for being a superb chef from Portugal, drawing the interest of a Ludlow restaurateur who quickly offered him a job as head chef and granted his new hire complete control of the kitchen. Again, an opportunity was seized and led to rapid success. Again, the opportunity was just a stepping stone toward his ultimate ambition.
Nuno loved his job and had no reason to chafe at working for someone else, at least artistically. “I had carte blanche on food preparation,” Nuno relates, “but I just didn’t want to work for anyone else. I wanted to work for myself.”
Nuno insists that he has only really ever cooked one way, in one style: his own. He based his approach on what he calls “traditional Portuguese home cooking,” without any formal study of the culinary arts. “I’ve never been in a classroom for cooking, never read a recipe or a cookbook,” he says. Instead, he learned most of what he knows about flavor and technique on his own, experimenting and, as Teixeira adds, “by appealing to his own palate.” Though he dines in other restaurants on occasion, he doesn’t look to other chefs for ideas or inspiration. “And he never complains,” says Teixeira, though he may privately question other chefs’ decisions with regard to preparation or choice of ingredients. “He often gets a cut of meat that he would never serve.”
As Nuno expounds his general philosophy on cooking, he becomes more animated, more passionate. “He says his ingredients are very simple, but he demands that they be of the very best quality,” Teixeira explains. “As a chef, he wants to bring out the natural flavors in the food, not to create new flavors,” she says before yielding the floor again. Nuno becomes even more intense.
“He wants to emphasize that the flavors at Primavera don’t change visit to visit. His sauces are always the same, consistent. If you had a dish 10 years ago and loved it, it will still be the same today,” she says when Nuno pauses.
Nuno’s commitment to consistency is evident in every aspect of his restaurant—from the size and open layout of the dining room, kitchen and bar area, which allow him to see everything that’s going on, to a menu crafted to support his demand for the best cuts of meat and the freshest seafood and vegetables.
“The size [of the restaurant] is perfect for him,” Teixeira translates. “The heart of a restaurant is the kitchen. A small kitchen means a small menu and a small dining room. Here he can see what’s going on with every detail in the kitchen, in the bar. And he can see his clients,” Teixeira says, then adds two phrases that I heard repeatedly from Nuno and his staff: “Everything has to be just so. Everything has to be to his liking.”
What Rocha likes, his legions of faithful customers like. He isn’t sure how it is that his palate, matched with his acquired skill, allows him to make a grilled cod with boiled potatoes, olive oil, peppers and onions that is at once true to Portuguese culinary traditions and uniquely his own. Nuno admits that, even now, after finding a faithful local following in heavily Portuguese Ludlow and winning accolades the world around from people who’ve come to try his food, he’s still surprised at some level by his success, just as friends in Portugal who’ve known him since boyhood are still amused that his eclectic talents led him into the restaurant business.
“When I came here,” he begins in halting English, then shakes his head and finishes his thought in Portuguese for Teixeira to translate: “I knew nothing about cooking.”
The secret to his success?
“He thinks it’s the result of passion,” Teixeira says. The acquisition of technique came fairly easy to Nuno, a quick study who, in the army or in business or in his early experience in restaurants, never needed to hear an instruction twice. “For him, cooking is all common sense. There’s a right way to do things and if you do them, the results will be consistently good. It takes a certain number of days to marinate a meat, for example. There are no short cuts. The same with soaking salted cod to take the salt out: it has to be done just right.”
Over the course of our interview, Nuno makes at least passing mention of nearly everything on his small but essential menu, his eyes lighting as he talks about the differences between a sauce meant for, say, halibut and one appropriate for a sweeter fish like salmon. In every case, his enthusiasm appears to grow out of the quality of the main ingredient, be it a T-Bone steak, a cut of pork or a piece of fish. A finished plate at Primavera is all built around and in service of its main feature. For that reason, Primavera is the sort of place where a diner is apt to leave the ordering to the chef. Tell Rocha you’d like a steak or perhaps the cod and leave the rest to him.
While Primavera undoubtedly owes much of its success to the loyal patronage of local Portuguese-Americans, Nuno is quick to note that he has more non-Portuguese patrons than those of Portuguese heritage. With those patrons in mind who, like me, have only passing familiarity with the cuisine, I asked Nuno for some recommendations.
For a fish lover, he might recommend the cod, but not grilled; his choice would be Bacalhau a Marinheiro (cod baked in a red sauce with shrimp and scallops). He’d be apt to steer a meat-eater to a pork dish, such as the Carne de Porco a Alentejana (pork and clams served over fried potato cubes) or the Javali (a grilled pork tenderloin steak).
Glancing at the menu and wine list, it is easy to understand why, once hooked, patrons keep coming back to Primavera to continue exploring Portuguese cuisine under the protective care of Jack Nuno. As I think about what I’ll order, my eye lands on a curious item: Bife na Pedra, or “beef on a rock.” The menu notes that it takes 30 minutes to heat the rock, upon which a patron cooks his own steak.
It is a very simple and subtle dish with no special seasoning. The rock, says Nuno, “gives the meat an entirely different taste than with wood or charcoal. It allows the natural flavor of the meat to come out without any interference.”
It seems a dish befitting this chef known as Rocha.”
