The Interior designer Nini Andrade has achieved her dream of opening a design centre in Madeira. The cherry on top is a restaurant under the responsibility of Chef Miguel Laffan.
Madeiran gastronomy lists black scabbardfish with banana; a dish created in the hotel industry that quickly spread around the island’s restaurants. Nowadays, it is seen a line that separates more classic restaurants from the more contemporary ones.
However, in the DC, Chef Miguel Laffan’s restaurant, the goal was to reinvent this concept. There is scabbardfish with banana, but it is a dessert, one of many conceived by Chef Damien Scelles, a creative genius and renown pastry chef, who joined the team as an executive chef and now works alongside Miguel Laffan, responsible for the restaurant’s menu. The dessert is shaped as a black scabbardfish and is a frozen dessert with a banana parfait, hence the pun.
Desserts are one of the restaurant’s high notes, to the point that the creation of a tasting menu exclusively for desserts is already under consideration. This is but one of many ideas, in a space purposefully designed to stimulate creation, be it gastronomic or otherwise.
‘I want to have lots and lots of art here’, confesses Nini Andrade Silva, the award-winning Madeiran interior designer with an international career, who now has achieved her dream of establishing her design centre in Madeira. Housed in the Fortress of Our Lady of the Conception, in the harbour area of Funchal, the Nini Design Centre is a space where the artist’s creations can be enjoyed, with a unique view of the city. The inauguration ceremony of this spot, also known to the people of the island as ‘Molhe’, had the presence of the President of the Portuguese Republic.
The upper floor is a kind of studio where, during daytime, artists can work or meet with their clients. In the evening, the room transforms itself into a restaurant with one of the best views of the city. It has two rooms and it is in the smaller and cosier one that Nini Andrade Silva shares her thoughts with Essential: ‘I’ve always had great studios though never with such a location’.
Most customers are out of Portugal, in Asia, or South America where, especially in Colombia, the artist has been developing projects. ‘Why not meet with them in Madeira?’ The design centre is a means of avoiding so many travels. ‘What I really want is to stay here’, she confesses.
There she feels at home, also because the room is decorated with furniture from her mother’s house and books from the family’s home library. In the late afternoon, the sun crossing the glass walls bathes the room in gold. By the evening there is a warm and gentle light making the environment a welcoming one. Finishing the setting is a young team devoting itself to a casual service.
But, for all purposes, the DC is restaurant. With a Michelin star already in his career, Chef Miguel Laffan is clear about his goals: ‘We intend to be a good restaurant’, which in this case equates to being a restaurant that ‘can share Nini’s vision of art and well-being in Madeira’.
The tagline was to ‘present a contemporary Madeira, with ideas for the future. To get a hold of the products and give them a new language, centred in fusion, in art’. Miguel Laffan clarifies that the menu will change as inspiration for new creations arises.
The dishes’ names stress the clear fusion of dishes from traditional Portuguese gastronomy, to which the chef has either given his own personal touch or completely reinvented. There is no shortage of examples, such as a golden ceviche, or a banana and ginger lemon puree, or a prawn green curry with coconut milk and basmati rice and lemon grass, or a foie gras risotto, or still, octopus rice. Miguel Laffan considers that ‘all that’s in the menu must look good’.
Until late afternoon, the hustle and bustle is in the lower floor. Besides an esplanade, during lunchtime, there is also the DC Lounge, casually called the ‘Gonçalves Zarco House’ by the team, in an homage to the Portuguese sailor who discovered Madeira in the 15th century. Simpler dishes are served here and there is a tribute to the young boys who, until a few decades ago, used to dive in the bay of Funchal to catch the coins that tourists threw them from ships, something know to the islanders as the mergulhança, meaning ‘the diving’.
The Nini Design Centre is also a museum portraying the main moments in the artist’s career, with award-winning furniture, commendations and the unavoidable, ‘rolled’ pebbles from the island’s beaches, her trademark, and her ‘obsession’, she confesses.
The project is housed in a building classified as heritage and has a shop that sells embroidery, Wicca and miniatures of the ‘steamboats of the Cape’, the ships that used to stop over at Madeira on their way to South Africa, besides many other designer pieces.
The Fortress of Our Lady of the Conception is a building from the 17th century on what used to be an islet in front of Funchal. With the harbour’s expansion and the construction of Funchal’s main pier, known by locals as the pier of Molhe da Pontinha, this islet was connected to Madeira. Throughout the ages, the fortress has been the object of many changes and adaptations.
