Restaurant La Piada

Porto, Portugal

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Restaurant La Piada

Porto, Portugal

Firm

LIBB

Type

Hospitality + Sport › Restaurant

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2015

SIZE

0 sqft - 1000 sqft

Photos

Tiago Mendes (15)

La Piada came from the will of our clients to open a restaurant where the piadina romagnola, a traditional dish from the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, would be adapted to Portuguese ingredients without disrespecting its format and origin.
This transformative process, which proposes the reinterpretation of a traditional element of a certain culture or region within a context strange to it, was transversal to the whole process, from the food to the space that houses it.
Since the beginning of this project that the premises revealed themselves as clear and ambitious. We had to create a welcoming space in harmony with the pre-existence, to recycle materials available on site or suitable to use in the project, to build using the craftsmanship available in the region and to achieve all this within a tight budget.
The limit of our intervention was on the built elements, leaving the decoration to the owners of the restaurant. Although, the proximity that we have with the clients allowed the dialog between all the elements, that today define and characterize La Piada, to be natural.
The restaurant is located at the ground floor of a building from the XVIII century, in Porto’s downtown, and aggregates the function of restaurant to a vintage store. The space, where originally was a wine business, was closed for decades, what caused the degradation of the wooden structures on its interior. It became evident that we needed to remove this elements, revealing the essential structure of the space – the ground, the granite walls and the 1st floor’s wooden slab – and the possibility to re-use beams, doors and shutters in chestnut wood as decorative elements.
Considering the space conditions as the catalyst of the new solutions, we adopted the re-interpretation of the pre-existence as the main theme of the project.
The strategy of intervention was simple and objective, consisting on re-establishing the original façade, to promote the relationship between the restaurant and the street, on removing all the elements unsuitable to today’s needs and in advanced state of degradation, on assuming the building’s structure as the space’s limit and on answering the new needs by adding functional plugins to the pre-existence.
This way, we achieved a result that emphasizes and gives who walks into La Piada the feeling of being in a contemporary restaurant inside the old Porto.
The process of giving a character to all the spaces was based on a rigorous selection of the materials to use, considering that the choices should communicate the strategy behind the project, resolve technical questions and to reveal a “handmade” character instead of a “standard” one. To achieve it, we used a strategy based on combining materials and techniques with vernacular or modern connotations in a process where every detail was verified on site.
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The project had to answer to a specific program: a dining room; a kitchen; a distribution space; a block of services composed by toilets, a staff room and food storage room; a room for the store; a public and a service patio.
The distribution of the program optimized the network of existent spaces, allowing to free the maximum net area for the main spaces and to make the movement inside them as fluid as possible. In other words, the organization of the program inside de pre-existence came naturally from the characteristics of the pre-existent spaces, being the dining room and the kitchen one functional group and the distribution, the services block and the store, another.
To emphasize the fluidity feeling, to unify the pre-existence and to amplify the new functions, we have chosen to give the same character to all the spaces, by finishing the walls with white paint, the ceiling with white wooden boards and the pavement with concrete. By doing this, we managed to treat all the functional modules differently without compromising the global coherence of the project.
The premises for the material selection process were directly related with the opposition of concepts like new or recycled, rural or urban and crafted or industrial. This can be exemplified by the use of recycled materials previously available on the building, like the beams and the old tiles used on the counter, by the use of materials that recall the history of the city’s façades, like the tiles on the kitchen, and by the use of materials that add the subtleness’s of the handmade, like the finishing of the toilets and its doors.
We can conclude that this project had, as a catalyst, the will to define a clear and flexible strategy. The balance between the expectations of an ambitious project and the determination to transform every problem into an opportunity was the key to its success.

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Restaurant La Piada

Porto, Portugal

Restaurant La Piada

Porto, Portugal

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team