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It has been a tough year, but everything is not bad. Some had good reason to celebrate what will go down in history as the year of the pandemic. This is the Happiness Almanac 2020. If you also had reasons to be happy this year, share it with us, send an email to [email protected]
It all precipitated at the end of November of a bloody year. The name of Ljubomir Stanisic jumped, once again, to the center of attention of the media sphere when he was assumed as the face of the Movement “Survive with bread and water”.
Going back in time, the reputed owner of the restaurant chef and consultant who cooks for somewhat wealthy and more or less democratic scholarships, he had already had airtime – as a jury of television programs, during his outbursts of reality shows more delivered to less well-off audiences, when doing programs on gastronomy and book writing for all tastes and pockets.
However, a very light photograph in the hand in the center of Lisbon during the demonstration that brought together professionals from the restaurant and hospitality sector brought the imposing Balkan figure to the center of the ring, with a well-groomed beard and arms torn by tattoos The spotlight is on the competing cook who doesn’t like politics, serves politicians at the table, but never uses them. Nor from António Costa, prime minister, a client whom he trusted to be a friend, in a long conversation, in the first person, with SAPO24. A seven-day hunger strike and a trip to the hospital followed, right under the gaze of the nation’s deputies, in São Bento. A gesture that he would come to recognize for having been “stupid”, in an interview with the Observer.
This, however, was not Ljubo’s first challenge action, as others treat it. He revealed it in a previous interview with RTP. The then simple kitchen assistant, recently landed in Portuguese lands, slept in front of the United States embassy in Lisbon. He rebelled against the war in Yugoslavia, the country of birth and from which he fled. “It was the first time it appeared in the newspapers,” he told the interviewer, Vítor Gonçalves.
Fame aroused envy, a characteristic that most abhors the people who love them so much. The Public Ministry would come knocking on his door at the culmination of an upheaval in which he plunged without fear.
In a year whose pandemic circumstances forced him to close his doors, he suffered, like so many other sectors of the economy, a valiant shake-up of accounts. But he did not go near the carpet.
2020 was also marked by the change of television station (from TVI to SIC). A short, controversial trip to the mix. Do not vary.
A star and a movie to close the year
When the year came to swing time, a star lit it up on Christmas Eve. Like Santa Claus, the bulky Mr. Michelin, dressed in red, the cover of the guide of the same name, on December 14, awarded a star to “100 Maneiras”, a restaurant in Bairro Alto, in the heart of Lisbon.
An international recognition that prompted him to take two pistols and shoot. It didn’t work. Before that, another tattoo was immortalized on the skin, as The Observer writes, in a body painting begun at age 14, in the former Yugoslavia, as he had already shown SAPO24, an art that he values so much.
From protest to consecration, a mixture of emotions corseted in the last two months of the year, in just 30 days, which could serve as a synopsis of the life whose story a film will give.
Ljubo’s life is a portrait of survival where pain and love can fit together. Crying, smiles and hugs. The excruciating suffering and ecstasy. Madness and the incessant quest to be the best. And where, surely, those who love the most will enter. The wife, Mónica Franco, the children, Mateus, 14 years old, 1.90 tall and 47 feet, like Stanisic, and Luca, 8 years old, the mother, Rosa, the sister, Natasha, her team, in particular, Manuel Maldonado and Miguel Saints, the right arms for those who hug and argue with them daily.
Names remembered in the time of success and whose pronunciation is capable of transforming the granite countenance into a jelly of easy emotions. And even make you shed tears. Cry.
A Portuguese with a Bosnian heart or vice versa
With the Michelin star assigned, the dream that had been at the base of the bankruptcy of the first project that opened in Portugal, in Cascais, was consummated. The search for perfection in the art of eating and serving threw him into the financial hole announced by the 2008 crisis. In debt, he went bankrupt, fell and rose again.
He tossed the dream into the garbage bag, almost as if someone was throwing a past behind him. And continued. Of pots, pans, knives and the restaurant sign in your hands.
The past also explains their resilience. Portuguese word that he must have learned a lot after the first words he learned with Portuguese girlfriends he had, at the age of 19. Or with colleagues, at the beginning of his career.
Born in Bosnia, in Sarajevo, Ljubomir Stanisic, lived close to the war that broke out in the Balkans. He doesn’t talk much about this episode. Stirs too many emotions. He was born in the middle of shooting and death. Friends and a country that revisits with a broken soul.
He took refuge at work in a bakery. From 14 to 18 years, he supports his family. He was a refugee, he passed through Serbia and Croatia. Leave hell behind. The home cooking palate is a souvenir brought back from Sarajevo.
He goes around the world and lands at the Portela airport in the late 90s. He follows in his sister’s footsteps. You have a tourist guide in hand. Buy a car and go on an adventure in Portugal. Gerês was love at first sight. That would lead to a marriage to the host country.
He worked for free, he took it “on the horns”, he learned a lot from other bosses: Michel Chabran, Fernando Barcena, (Alain) Ducasse, (Paul) Bocuse and Vítor Sobral.
Citizen of the world, Portuguese with a Yugoslav heart (Bosnian), or vice versa, he admits that he was not born with cooking on the horizon. It would be anything. And it would always be good at what you did. You don’t believe in luck. Yes, you believe in work. And in the search for perfection.
He loves knives, defines himself as a man of excess and wants to grow old and throw the phrase into the air. “Wow, my life was a whirlwind.”
He loves hunting and fishing. Live to eat. Eat everything. Everything that moves, “from entrails, necks, hearts, livers, kidneys, testicles, reds, molhengos … brains, eyes, fish heads, cow and pig heads” enters through his mouth, he admitted, three years ago . . Today has changed a bit. Already crunching vegetables and other flavors that sprout from the ground. Write about them, cook them and serve them.
Through clenched teeth, mistakes often arise. Just do a search for granted interviews. Few will be the people to whom a “fuck” seems to be recited poetry.
It has no filter between the mouth and the brain. Mónica Franco, the great woman behind the more than 1.85 cooks, characterizes it in four words. Follow the order of a tasting menu. Starter, main course, main course and dessert.
Add a previous note. Like a drink. “Ai”, responds to the question, via SMS, from SAPO 24, admitting “I usually escape from this. Then serve the features. It is “authentic”. It has a “heart in its mouth.” A “generous” being. Finally, define it as a “wild bull”.
To show his generosity and authenticity, Ljubomir helped Leonardo, an assistant at a sushi restaurant in Nazaré, who fell into unemployment. And, with 2021 lurking, bury the year that ended with the burial of the cod, a video shared with his legion of fans on social media.
2021 will bring new chapters. We will wait for the fabric to rise.
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