Italian guests often need ten or fifteen minutes before they believe it. The ragù, the parmigiana, the pasta that tastes like their mother's. All of it is vegan.
Al Sanpietrino Trattoria sits in an anonymous alley in Alfama, Lisbon. Five tables inside. Alex De Franco and Kajsa Schmid run it together, and they describe it as the first vegan Italian restaurant in Portugal.
New tradition, comfort cuisine
Alex grew up in Italy with his mother's cooking. Kajsa is Swiss, and her grandmother lived in Lisbon, so childhood visits to grandma always meant Lisbon. After living in Italy together, they moved to Portugal and turned a small Portuguese snack bar into a trattoria.
Alex had been vegetarian since 2014. When Kajsa explained how traditional cheese is made, he went vegan in 2020. The question then was what would happen to the family recipes. They didn't want to lose them. So they kept the dishes and changed the ingredients.
Their slogan is "new tradition, comfort cuisine". Tradition, as Alex puts it, is something that changes slightly and becomes tradition again.
How they run it
The restaurant takes reservations only. Every day they cook for exactly the number of guests booked, so there is almost no food waste. They stopped making pizza, even though it once filled the room, because vegan pizza is everywhere and it wasn't what they wanted to cook.
A guest from Sardinia once told Alex that a soup reminded her of her mother's. That is the point for them: food that brings back a memory, without cruelty.
The charity night
For this film, Alex and Kajsa opened the restaurant on a closed night for a charity dinner with friends. They donated the food and the wine, the guests donated money, and together we raised around 500 euros for two dog shelters in Portugal.
Why I made this film
I first ate here at the end of Web Summit 2022. Alex and I bonded over limoncello, and that visit is the reason I started my YouTube channel. A year later, I came back to make this film.
Since going vegan, I have tried preaching and arguing. Nothing has worked as well as what Alex and Kajsa do: serve really good food and let people enjoy it.
Read the original article about Al Sanpietrino.
The question this film answers: what happens if you don't follow the expected path?