It wasn’t the centuries-old culinary history between Portugal and India that inspired Rick Di Virgilio and Shiva Patel to dream up their Houston restaurants. It was just life—and love.

The two met when Patel walked into Di Virgilio’s first restaurant, Oporto Café, in 2006. A former coffee shop across from the Costco on Richmond Avenue, the tiny space didn’t have a proper kitchen, but Di Virgilio made it work. In honor of his dual Portuguese and Italian heritage, he dished out classic Portuguese cuisine alongside Italian café staples like panini and focaccia. Patel, an early customer, stopped in for coffee, then wine, and finally, wine and conversation with the chef-owner himself. Before they knew it, a romance had developed, and Patel became more involved in the restaurant. With Di Virgilio’s busy schedule, it was initially the only way they could see each other. He was almost a one-person band at the café, and Patel’s background in corporate banking and commercial real estate came in handy for certain aspects of the business. She kept him organized and motivated. Putting herself through culinary school in the evening also had its perks. She added new touches to the menu, inspired by her own unique cultural patchwork.

Patel’s parents were born in Tanzania, where her Indian grandparents had settled during British colonization. They built a successful life there, but political upheaval in East Africa prompted their relocation to London, where Patel was born. She spent some time between the two countries as a child before her family eventually moved to Houston in 1988 in search of better opportunities.

It’s a familiar Houstonian story. Also drawn by opportunity, Di Virgilio’s family came here in 1978, during upstate New York’s economic decline. His father, born in Italy, and his mother, from the Portuguese island of Madeira, had settled there but were again uprooted when Di Virgilio was just a boy.

A Portuguese Italian by way of New York falling in love with a London-born Indian by way of East Africa—in Houston, no less—has led to thrilling culinary combinations. Just don’t call it “fusion,” they say. The couple understands the value of the word in describing specific food trends, especially when it first came into the lexicon in the ’80s, a very different time in America’s gastronomic evolution. Today, the term feels contrived. “It always sounded like more of a carnival food type of thing,” Patel says. They prefer to call what they do a “blending of cultures,” more of a natural amalgam of their respective lived experiences, which are reflected in every project they’ve undertaken together.

Di Virgilio and Patel’s first joint venture, Queen Vic, opened in 2009. Located in Upper Kirby, a few blocks from Oporto Café, the British-Indian gastropub combined the two cuisines while tapping into Texas’s emerging craft beer scene. Then, in 2015, they opened Oporto Fooding House & Wine in Midtown as the grown-up version of the café, a restaurant with a much bigger dining room and a full-service kitchen. The focus there is more on traditional Portuguese food, offering dishes like bacalhau, cataplana mussels, grilled octopus, caldeirada stew, and the classic Prego grilled steak sandwich. Yet Indian influences still seep into the menu, particularly those of Goa—a former Portuguese colony where the culinary ties between the two countries are strongest—in the form of pork vindalho and seafood curry. Even the subtle addition of turmeric and caraway in the scallop farrotto is intentional. All spice blends are toasted and ground in-house, many of them following ratios from Patel’s family recipes. “At the end of the day, this is a reflection of [our parents and] all of their triumph,” she says. “So, I’m just happy that we can honor [them].”

After successful runs, Queen Vic closed in 2018 and the original Oporto Café in 2019. The couple’s latest venture, Da Gama, leans even more into their global perspectives. Unveiled in the M-K-T Heights development in 2021, the restaurant features an airy café setting and a patio overlooking the nearby hike and bike trail. A takeout window stays busy on weekends, serving passersby with items like Da Gama’s popular chai, a drink from the Patel family’s recipe trove. The main menu takes diners along a spice route not unlike the one established by the restaurant’s namesake, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama. You’ll find the Indian mainstays: samosas, chana masala, and saag paneer; established culinary mash-ups, including piripiri chicken (a Portuguese-African creation that dates back hundreds of years) and Goan specialties; plus Di Virgilio–Patel originals like aloo gobi bravas and bacalhau with chutney. There’s even some Tanzanian flavor sprinkled in, shining through in dishes like the Mwanza yucca and beef mishkaki, a popular barbecued street food.

While Patel and Di Virgilio draw inspiration from the story of explorer da Gama’s spice trade to share their culinary influences with diners, they’re quick to note that Da Gama the restaurant doesn’t fit neatly into a mold. “It’s not a Goan restaurant,” Di Virgilio says. “Yes, there’s some inspiration there. Neither one of us is from Goa. We don’t cook Goan food.”

Five hundred years after the initial Portuguese colonies were established on the western coast of India, an Indian East African Londoner, entirely by chance, walked into a Portuguese Italian New Yorker’s life in a strip mall in Houston. The culinary world they’ve built through their restaurants is more than just a product of history. It’s something new altogether. Something more Houstonian.