Originally published in Diário de Notícias, 26 May 2019.
Although Timorese people have rebuilt national faith and identity, 25 years of Indonesian occupation proved enough to erase the culinary tradition of East Timor. Portuguese chef Luís Simões has been touring the country since 2014 to recover the memory of the island’s flavours — a story of cultural emancipation told through the kitchen.
The Dish That Started It All: Saboko
The conversation begins with the Saboko. It is a fish wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked over a bonfire with chilli, tamarind, and garlic. Alongside it comes a purée of banana and coconut — fruits that grow everywhere on the island. If there is a Timorese national dish, this is it.
“A tradition that was lost during the years of the Indonesian occupation and is now being recovered,” says Luís Simões. “Saboko was once again found all over the island. When a dish is recovered, a whole tradition and an identity are recovered.”
What Occupation Erased
When Luís arrived in 2014, he quickly understood the scale of the damage:
- Cooking techniques — grilling and steaming had been replaced by frying; fritters were everywhere.
- Native herbs — largely disappeared from everyday diets, replaced by non-native proteins.
- Cultural confidence — people had grown ashamed of their own food, associating it with poverty.
“This delicious, home-made food was disappearing from the recipe; people were ashamed of being gastronomy of poverty.” It was then that Luís realised the urgency of his mission: act before the memory was gone entirely.
A Chef Shaped by Adversity
Luís Simões knew he loved cooking from the age of seven, when he prepared dinner for his mother and three brothers while she worked. Family hardship meant he was later institutionalised at the Work of Friar Gil in Mira. By fourteen, his path was set.
“I wanted to be the chef of this place wherever I went, so I went to the cooking and pastry course in a professional hotel and tourism school in Coimbra.”
He studied at the College of St. Teotonius, practising in the kitchens at night and developing an early fascination with chocolate — using it in savoury dishes, adding heat to it, and learning to push boundaries.
To enter the Estoril Higher School of Hospitality, he faced a significant obstacle: his technical-professional education left him without Geography. A retiring schoolteacher in Coimbra solved it.
“In two months he gave me two years of material. I took 14, I got in.”
He was the first person from his host institution to enter higher education.
Building Experience Abroad
At the Higher School, Luís funded unpaid international internships by running outside catering from the institute’s kitchens and teaching cooking classes at the local employment centre. His placements included:
| Location | Employer |
|---|---|
| Tenerife | Ritz Carlton |
| Prague | Hilton |
| São Tomé and Príncipe | Grupo Pestana |
The São Tomé posting proved pivotal. Managing hotel staff there, he encountered the same structural difficulties he had faced growing up. “If you value someone else’s work, you are contributing to development.” From that point, he knew he needed to see another world.
Landing in Dili
In January 2014, a contact from the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria passed his name to an Indonesian businessman opening a hotel in Timor-Leste. Luís initially said no — he had a stable position at Pestana and had never considered the other side of the world. But the idea would not let go.
On 14 January 2014 he landed in Dili.
“I thought I was going to find everything destroyed — after all, it was nothing like that. But I also thought people spoke Portuguese, when in fact the language was Tetum.”
As he learned the basics of Tetum, he taught English and Portuguese to hotel staff. “It was my way of giving them a tool to outdo themselves.”
Turning Shame Into Pride
Luís’s curiosity about Timorese gastronomy grew from his first weeks. Whenever a hotel employee fell ill, he made a point of visiting them in their home village — partly out of respect, partly to see what was eaten in the huts.
“The Timorese are extraordinarily shy; at first they did not want me near their food roots. But, insisting, I was turning shyness into pride.”
Back at the hotel, he cooked with the ingredients he had discovered — the remarkable diversity of local chourizo, banana and pumpkin combinations, meat skewers grilled over open fires — steadily piecing together the flavour map of the island.
Sabor de Timor: Book and Television
In 2016, Luís launched a television programme called Sabor de Timor. He presented in Portuguese; his hotel assistant translated into Tetum. The format was simple: recreate traditional dishes and discuss the value of the traditions behind them. Audiences responded — here was someone from outside who cared deeply about what locals had been taught to dismiss.
The programme became the foundation for the first book ever dedicated to the gastronomy of Timor-Leste, also titled Sabor de Timor, with a preface written by Xanana Gusmão.
A Living Legacy
Luís Simões no longer works at the original hotel, but he continues collecting recipes and teaches at the local university. In 2019, he organised a street food fair on Rua Cidade de Lisboa with his students, including a competition to find the best sate — a traditional meat skewer.
“Perhaps nothing will please me more than knowing that in the last year the first two exclusively Timorese restaurants opened in the city. As authentic food is valued, Timor becomes more Timor.”
He brought this story to Lisbon in May 2019, speaking at the Guelra Blood Symposium — held alongside the Guelra gastronomic festival under the motto The Power of Food — on a panel of critics, chefs, and producers exploring how culinary traditions become engines of cultural emancipation.
Source: Diário de Notícias