...with Lino Oliveira

BY QUINN CURTIS AND LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

I grew up mainly with my mom, and I was always watching what she was cooking. I was always fascinated with food, and I had to cook for myself at a very young age because she was busy. I really thought she was the best cook in the world, and I wanted to cook like her,” says Adelino Oliveira (Lino for short), chef and owner of Edmonton’s Sabor restaurant and Bodega Tapas and Wine Bars.

Oliveira lives and breathes hospitality. Born in Portugal, he immigrated to Canada in 1977 and started working in restaurants at a very young age. “In 1984, I got my first job in this industry as a busboy in a restaurant that — to this day in Edmonton, I haven’t seen anything of that calibre. Victor’s was a very high-end, Frenchstyle establishment. It was the type of restaurant where you couldn’t go in without a tie and a blazer,” says Oliveira.

When he and his wife decided to move back to Portugal and open a small café on the beach, he never imagined it would spark his lifelong career as a chef and restaurant owner. “For the first year, I was taught by my customers how to cook. Portuguese people believe they’re the best cooks in the world, and they would actually come right into the open kitchen and tell me how I should do things — saying it was good, but I should do it this way, or that their mother does it like that. Then I developed relationships and learned from the ladies who sold me fish down at the docks, the vegetable vendors on the street, the butcher, the baker — everybody. They really helped me create what I do now. The community was my schooling,” says Oliveira.

But it was tough to be a restaurant owner in Portugal in the 2000s. Inflation started to take its toll, so people weren’t going out as much. That’s when he and his wife decided to move back to Canada in 2007 and open a restaurant, bringing a little piece of Portugal with them.

“Now, our small restaurant that we opened is 200 seats, and I’m still learning!” laughs Oliveira. “Sabor started off as a smaller space, meant to feel as much like home as I could make it. And home to me is a small restaurant that serves what I would put on my table, what my family would eat, and what my mother would have fed me back in the day. It’s about bringing that feeling of home — the culture where I come from, where I grew up, where I learned how to cook, where I learned how to eat.”

Sabor grew exponentially in popularity, and since it was on the upper floor of a building, Oliveira decided to expand to street level as well. “So we set up a little tapas bar downstairs, where I would just stand in the afternoon. Especially in the summer, with the doors open, people could come in, have a glass of wine, and enjoy some tapas,” he says.

The only problem? They couldn’t keep the street-level part open in the winter. “So one day, we thought, why don’t we just open a bar down here, give it a new name, a new menu where tapas is the focus, and create a new space? And we called it Bodega.”

Now, Oliveira has turned the small tapas bar that Edmontonians could previously only enjoy in the summer into a thriving restaurant chain with seven locations across the city.

So, you may be wondering, what bottle is a man like this saving for a special occasion? Well actually, there are two: one for Oliveira, who was born in 1968, and one for his wife, who was born in 1971.

“When my wife and I got married in Portugal, the priest who married us was a regular customer at our establishment. He used to come every night, have his coffee, and sit there reading the paper. We got to know him and developed a friendship, and he told us that if we ever got married, he wanted to officiate the ceremony. On our wedding day, he gave me a 1968 bottle of port and gave my wife a 1971 bottle of port,” says Oliveira.