What Our Chef in Porto Taught Us About the Years in Between

Before we ever landed in Porto, I was looking for a private chef for our first night together, the kind of welcome dinner that sets the tone for everything after it. Murilo and Layla, who cook together in Porto, were the first profile I opened.

Their profile mentioned Murilo learning to cook beside his father, a detail that came before any mention of the Michelin-star kitchens he has since worked in. It reminded me of my own dad, who died in August 2021 when I was twenty-seven. Portugal was the last place we travelled together, and something about a chef who put his father before his résumé made me want to book him before I had even finished reading.

We landed on a menu that took some back and forth: octopus salad with pico de gallo to start, sea bass with beurre blanc, pea puree, and citrus emulsion for the main, and pears soaked in port wine with crumble to finish, a small nod to the valley we were about to travel into.

Eleven of us sat down together that first night in Porto, most of us in our twenties and thirties, most of us having lost a parent, all still strangers to each other a few hours earlier.

It was only once we had already booked him that I learned the rest of it, and Murilo has since told this story himself, openly, so I am not telling anything here that is not already his to tell. His dad died when Murilo was fourteen. The years after were hard in a specific way he has been honest about: not only grief, but guilt layered on top of it, the guilt of having been a normal teenager before that, sometimes a difficult one. What he carried afterward was the loss itself, and separately, the wish that he had been a better son while he still had the chance to be one.

At some point he left his home country and moved to Portugal, looking for something like a fresh start. Cooking is what he found there, not right away, and not because anyone handed him a plan. It gave him a way back to connection first, and eventually to purpose, the slow kind that takes years rather than the kind that arrives in a single before-and-after photo. He met his wife, Layla, through that same thread. She found his cooking videos online before she ever met him, and the two of them cook together now, professionally, as a couple.

We hear the second half of stories like this all the time. Someone lost someone, and then, later, they found purpose, or a new life, or a version of themselves they like better. It gets told as though the gap in the middle were short, or simple, or somehow inevitable once you already know how the story ends. It usually isn't. What gets left out is how long that gap actually lasts, how much of it is just hard, with nothing visible to show for it, before anything like purpose turns up on the other side. Or what it costs to get there. Or, just as often skipped, how genuinely worth it, it turns out to be, once you do.

None of us at that table knew any of this while we were eating. I think that is true of most of the people who feed us, or teach us, or show up for us in ordinary professional ways: we rarely know what it took them to become who they are standing in front of us as. I just wish more of the story in between got told.