A plate being set down by candlelight in the dining room at Cendre

Alfama · Lisboa — Two Michelin Stars

Everything herehas met the fire.

Name: Cendre
Address: Travessa do Forno 12, Lisboa, 1100-231, PT
Telephone: 73692 40518
Price range: €€€€

Twenty-two seats around a single wood-burning hearth. No gas line, no induction, no second chances — the menu is written each afternoon from whatever the boats and the hill farms send down.

Reserve a table Tonight's fire

Position: 38.7139° N, 9.1305° W
Fire lit: 06:00
Grate: 640°C
Covers: 22
Scroll

The bar at Cendre under low warm light before service

Dry-aged beef resting on paper beside coarse salt

Fig. 01

Mirandesa rib, sixty days on the bone in the cellar beneath the room.

The house

We cook withone fire, lit atsix in the morning.

Cendre began in 2014 as a pop-up in a disused bakery on the Travessa do Forno — a room that already had a brick oven, a chimney, and two centuries of soot in the walls. We never got around to installing a stove.

Everything that reaches your table has passed through live flame, embers, ash, or the smoke that rises off them. Vegetables are buried in the coals. Fish is hung above them. Butter is browned in a pan set on the grate. The fire is lit before dawn and dies out around midnight, and its temperature is the only clock the kitchen keeps.

Fire is not a technique here. It is the entire vocabulary.

0
Seats in the room: 0°C
Peak heat at the grate: 0
Producers within 90km: 0
Gas lines in the building

Tonight's fire

Six thingsworth the heat

The card changes daily. These six have earned a permanent place at the grate — each one listed with the temperature it met and the time it spent there.

Aged beef rib carved and plated with charred greens

01 / 06

Dry-aged on the bone in the cellar beneath the room, then cooked over spent embers with the grate lowered twice. Served with its own dripping and nothing else.

Wine pairings are chosen the same afternoon the food is. Ask for the list at the counter.

Book a table

A cook spooning sauce over a line of plates at the pass

Chef's table — six covers

The EmberMenu

Six stools face the hearth, close enough that you will feel the fire change when the grate is lowered. The menu is not printed. Each course is handed over the coals and explained in a sentence, and the last one is cooked in the dying ash while you finish your wine.

Served Tuesday to Saturday, one seating at 19:30
The full run takes a little under three hours
Dietary requirements need forty-eight hours' notice

Eleven courses

€165

Add the cellar

Wine pairing 95

Request the Ember Menu

The room

A room builtaround achimney.

The dining room seats twenty-two on two levels: eight at the hearth counter, fourteen at tables cut from a single olive trunk. The lighting is set to the fire, not the other way around — it drops through service as the coals go down.

The counter: Eight seats a metre from the grate. Loud, warm, and the best view of the pass.
The long table: Fourteen covers on one olive plank, lit by a single low pendant.
The cellar room: A private vault for ten beneath the dining room, cut into the hillside.

Filament pendants hung low over the counter at Cendre

The length of the bar, lit gold, before doors open

Chef Noor Almeida finishing a plate under the heat lamps at the pass

Chef & Founder

Lisboa / Basque country

At the hearth

“A fire tells you what it wants. The only skill worth having is learning to hear it before it shouts.”

Noor Almeida

Noor trained in Lisbon, then spent four years in the Basque country learning to cook over wood at a time when almost nobody outside those hills still did. Cendre opened in 2014 with eight seats and a borrowed grill.

Two Michelin stars followed in 2019 and 2021, and a Green Star in 2023 for the sourcing that comes with cooking this way — you cannot hide a mediocre ingredient behind a sauce when the only seasoning is smoke.

The cellar

Wine thatcan standnext to smoke

Four hundred labels, weighted heavily toward the Douro, the Jura and Etna — regions whose wines have enough structure and reduction to survive a plate that has been on fire. The list is short on oak and long on old vines.

Rosé being poured in the low light of the cellar room

The Hearth Flight
€95
Five glasses
Poured alongside the Ember Menu, chosen the same afternoon the food is.
- Douro branco
- Jura savagnin
- Etna rosso
- Bairrada
- Madeira, 1978
Old Vines
€68
Three glasses
Three bottles from vines older than the room, opened at the counter and finished by the last table.
- Colares ramisco
- Dão encruzado
- Douro field blend
No Sulphur
€54
Three glasses
Growers working without additions, from Alentejo and the Loire. Bright enough to cut through the ash.
- Vinho verde
- Chenin, Anjou
- Alentejo tinto

The room, photographed

Ash, glass,and low light

Shot across one evening service in February, from the moment the grate was cleaned to the last table leaving.

In their words01 / 05

“I have eaten in rooms with three stars that made me feel less. The prawn arrives ninety seconds after it hits the grate and you understand immediately that nothing else was needed.”
Elena Marchetti
Restaurant critic, Corriere · Milan

On the record

Kept, notcollected

Guides have been kind to the room. The kitchen treats each of these as a reason to keep the fire honest rather than a reason to raise the prices.

2021 — 2026

Two Stars

Michelin Guide

Held since 2021

2023 — 2026

Green Star

Michelin Guide

Sourcing & sustainability

2025

No. 31

World's 50 Best

Highest new entry, Iberia

2024

18/20

Gault & Millau

Chef of the Year, Portugal

2022 — 2026

Three Soles

Repsol Guide

Fire cookery

2023

Restaurant of the Year

Time Out Lisboa

Readers' choice

Reserve

Sit close tothe fire.

Tables open sixty days ahead at 09:00 Lisbon time. The hearth counter and the Ember Menu are released the same morning and tend to go within the hour.