RESTAURANT NEWS | NORTHEAST
Kevin Matos Brings Portuguese Cooking Home at Café Alma
By Maria Rodriguez | 1:27 p.m. ET, June 6, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
Kevin Matos remembers sleeping on bags of flour while his parents worked nights at Matos Bakery, the Pawtucket business they opened after immigrating from Portugal.
Now the bakery’s bread, pastries, and chouriço have made their way to Café Alma, Matos’ new restaurant on East Providence’s Warren Avenue. The café occupies a 1920 building that once housed Silva’s Seafood Market, in the middle of a stretch long known for Portuguese restaurants and businesses.
Matos trained at Johnson & Wales, worked at Nicks on Broadway, staged at the Michelin-starred Aldea in New York, and spent time in French fine dining in Boston. Café Alma brings that experience back to the food he grew up around, though Matos is not trying to build a museum. “This will be New England Portuguese,” he told The Boston Globe, describing cooking shaped as much by Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts as by Portugal.
In the morning, that means egg and chouriço sandwiches on bolo lêvedo, Portuguese sweet bread, pastéis de nata, bolacha Maria desserts, and a pastel de nata latte topped with whipped cream and one of the custard tarts. Later come smoked chouriço wings, bacalhau, grilled octopus, smoked piri-piri quail, bifana, shrimp Mozambique, and potatoes cooked in duck fat.
The original tin ceiling is painted deep blue. A mural outside recalls Portuguese tilework, while another honors fado singer Amália Rodrigues. Local art hangs for sale, and Matos has plans for live music, wine clubs, chef collaborations, and eventually a tasting menu.
Café Alma is not simply Matos Bakery with tables and cocktails. It is what happens when a son takes the food that raised him, adds everything he learned after leaving home, and brings it back to the same Portuguese corridor.
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