Restaurants serving Brazilian food in São Paulo

Brazil is in vogue in Brazil. Ever since Europeans and Americans fell in love with all things Brazilian, from caipirinhas and bossa nova to Gisele and her Havaianas flip flops, Brazilians began to see their country with new eyes. With all the new restaurants in São Paulo proudly serving banana, black bean or coconut dishes, it’s hard to believe that up until recently, native products, like cachaça (sugarcane spirit), goiabada (guava sweet) and rapadura (hardened sugarcane molasses) were shunned by top chefs. Brazilians always enjoyed their local food at home or at their favourite pub, but fine dining had to be French or Italian-based. The more imported ingredients like saffron, funghi and aspargus, the better.
The first to challenge this view were French chefs who moved to Rio in the 80’s. Laurent Suaudeau and Claude Troisgros, amazed by the exotic fruits and vegetables, introduced them into their classical French cuisine. Now, a new generation of chefs in São Paulo is following their lead, and finding sophisticated ways of cooking with Brazilian ingredients that were once considered too pedestrian.

Shortly after opening D.O.M., in 2000, Alex Atala began pairing black beans with foie gras, and giving fresh fishes from the Amazon a place of honour on his menu.

Since then the trend picked up, with the recent opening of restaurants where local takes preference over imports. At the charming Maní (pictured above), model-turned-chef Helena Rizzo and her partner Daniel Redondo (ex-Celler de Can Roca) give the humble manioc royal treatment, with a drizzle of truffle oil. A sparkly cachaça jelly and Brazil nut shavings crown her foie gras terrine.

More food expert than chef, Ana Luiza Trajano opened early in 2006 Brasil a Gosto (pictured below, its bar area) – a high-design place on a leafy, secluded street - after a long exploratory voyage throughout the country to research regional recipes and customs.


She serves lighter, up-to-date renderings of traditional dishes such as fish stew (moqueca) with rice and also her own combinations of native ingredients, such as tucunaré, an Amazonian fish, served with manioc. And a starter of queijo coalho, a white cheese that is charred on the outside, commonly eaten as a snack at the beaches of the Northeast Region (Nordeste).




At Capim Santo, in the same Jardins district, young chef Morena Leite, from Bahia state, is turning fruits like jabuticaba and pitanga into sauces, and baking ritzier versions of the coconut and guava sweets of her childhood.

Now there are even newer restaurants specializing in Brazilian food. Dalva e Dito, for one, which I described in detail here. And soon-to-open Chafariz.

Brasil a Gosto: Rua Professor Azevedo do Amaral, 70, tel. 55-11-3086-3565, Capim Santo: Al. Ministro Rocha Azevedo, 471, tel. 55-11-3068-8486 D.O.M.: Rua Barão de Capanema, 549, tel. 55-11-3088-0761 Maní: Rua Joaquim Antunes, 210, tel. 55-11-3085-4148

Alex Atala serves Amazonian ingredients to Ferran Adrià and other top Spanish chefs

São Paulo hosted last November one of the world's greatest food events, the Mesa Tendências, with most of Spain's top chefs in attendance: Berasategui, Adrià, Arzak, Adoni, Roca, etc.

The chefs were completely blown away by some of the things they saw and tasted while in Brazil, especially the rare ingredients flown in from the Amazon by celeb chef Alex Atala. He used the ingredients in a tasting menu served at his restaurant D.O.M to Spanish greats Ferran Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, Martin Berasategui, Joan Roca & co.

The day of the dinner - which Atala said was the most important of his life - I spent some hours at D.O.M. with him. With us, there were two chefs – Josean Alija and Enaitz Landaburu, from the restaurant at the Guggenheim Bilbao, in.... Bilbao and Spanish food writer Pau Arenòs (below, at left).

The afternoon we spent together was a trip filled with strange and delicious smells and flavours, which showed me why the Spanish avant garde chefs are so fascinated by Brazil.

It was sensory overload: Alex showed us each one of the things he had sourced for the dinner, starting with Amazonian heart of palm, baked whole (which is now farmed in São Paulo state, rather than taken from the wild):

He then had us taste priprioca syrup:

Priprioca is a root that yields a bizarre-tasting syrup that seemed to be a blend of patchouli incense and pot:

We then bit into chunks of cupuaçu. I confess I've never been a fan of the fruit in the raw, its flesh is milky and stiky, and its perfume, cloying and almost aggressive. But the chefs were mesmerized:

Good thing we were able to taste an improved version of the fruit: in jelly form. Pretty little rectangles coated in fine sugar.

We then tasted licuri, a bland fruit that looked like a prune but had a much bigger pit. Interesting.

Be patient, the list goes on.... There was also the pequi, a fruit that is abundant in the Central plains of Brazil. It is fatty and has a strong aroma, and Atala extracts its oil to use sparingly as seasoning.

We also had chá mate bombons. Not all that exotic to a Brazilian, but delicious all the same. The mate flavour seemed heightened, concentrated.

Atala then cut open an Amazonian apricot - which I'd never heard of before! It looked nothing like an apricot, yet the taste was similar. I found it light and refreshing and noticed a slight orangey aftertaste.

Other fruits we tasted: araçá (unfortunately not ripe enough), abiu (round and yellow, like a small passion fruit, with fatty, milky flesh) and uxí, a miniature coconut. There were also tiny green tomatoes that exploded in the mouth (below).

Suddenly, Atala pulls out a half-rotten tree trunk, which had been removed from an igarapé - the flooded swamps of the Amazon. The fallen tree trunks that lay underwater in the Amazonian rivers serve as home to river worms that are called turús. These river worms were the highlight of Atala's dinner - the Spaniards couldn't get enough of them! Served near raw, with only a few drops of lime, they have a taste and texture similar to an oyster.

I tasted mine raw and unseasoned. It tasted of... a river.

To see Atala chopping the trunk in half with a machete to extract the turú, click play on the video below:

At the end, we tasted several fruit sorbets: graviola, cambuci, umbu, uvaia, cajá and cupuaçu.

That night, Atala was moved to be cooking for some of his idols. Here is the ten-course menu he served, in Spanish:

• Ensalada de calabacin y cigala con vinagreta de pimienta aromática
• Breaded oyster with marinated tapioca
  
• Turú (river worms)
• Filhote con tucupí y tapioca
• Cigala real con curry negro, trabeques y infusion de lemongrass
• Risoto líquido de coco, aceites de menta y dendê, alga nori
• Brandade de palmito al horno con achoas del Cantabrico
• Sorbet de cagaita
• Crème caramel aromatizado con priprioca, ravióli de limon tahiti y banana oro (pictured at the top of this post)
  
• Bizcocho de castanha de Pará con helado de whisky, curry y chocolate

Here's a photo of the cagaita sorbet, served on an ice block:

At the end, the dinner turned into a big party, the chefs visibly moved to all be together in the same room, which they never manage to do in Spain. Here are some snippets from the speeches made:

Juan Mari Arzak: "I have no words to describe what I have seen. From the bottom of our heards, we don't even know how to thank you enough."

Ferran Adrià: "This was a historic trip, not just for Brazil, but for us too. Please know that you have many friends in Spain, as we feel we have many friends here".

Martin Berasategui: "There is nothing harder than making a dinner like this. When everyone is tired from participating in a big event. When everyone has had too much to drink. I had heard many good things about this restaurant, but after seeing the sublety and the elegance of this dinner I was floored. An incredible lesson".

From left to right: Martin Berasategui, Ferran Adrià, Joan Roca, Juan Mari Arzak, Alex Atala

An interview with Brazil's number one chef, Alex Atala

The media and his peers have crowned Alex Atala São Paulo’s top chef. This avid fisherman and hunter is chef and part-owner of D.O.M. - considered by many São Paulo’s top table (pictured below).


At the strikingly beautiful restaurant he serves up a modern cuisine, which combines Brazilian ingredients – such as Amazonian herbs and fresh heart of palm – and techniques from classic France and modern Spain.
Atala’s path to becoming Brazil’s haute cuisine king was a long one. At 19 Atala left his native São Paulo to tour Europe on a shoestring budget. Two years at the École d´Hôtelerie Namur followed. Diploma in hand, he worked at many restaurants during his five-year stay abroad, including Bruneau (three stars in the Michelin Guide).
Atala returned to Brazil in 1994 and in 2000 opened his flagship D.O.M. Since 2001, it has been voted each year best contemporary restaurant by Gula magazine (the Brazilian equivalent of Gourmet) and also by Brazil’s most prestigious restaurant guide, published annually by Veja, the country’s preeminent newsweekly.

Alexandra Forbes: Within a year of opening, D.O.M. was crowned the best of its kind in the city. What is behind your meteoric rise?
Alex Atala: Everything in life involves a bit of luck, but also a lot to do with the fact that I found a market niche. And people appreciate that if I promise an 8, I will deliver an 8. I never promise a 10 only to deliver a 6.

A.F.: You’ve said before that you don’t consider what you do today a national cuisine, since what you do does not fit into the standards of Brazilian cookery. How would you define, then, the style of food you serve?
Alex Atala: Let me clarify: I do what I call Brazilian gastronomy, and not Brazilian home cooking. I don’t use the same methods as Brazilian home cooks, although I do work with a lot of the same native ingredients. My cuisine aims to heighten the flavours of ingredients, most of all, of Brazilian ingredients mostly, through the use of haute cuisine techniques, mostly European.

A.F.: You’ve been experimenting with some innovative cooking techniques that are also being useed by a select group of avant-garde chefs, mostly based in Spain. These have included pulverizing foie gras and cooking meats in vacuum-sealed bags. What is the importance of these new cooking methods in your kitchen?
Alex Atala: They are very important because some of these new cooking methods that you mention allow me to achieve certain flavours and textures that I could not achieve using more traditional techniques. These new methods are tools I use, but experiments are not what drives my kitchen. My food is not wildly experimental, it’s food that looks like food.

A.F.: Ferrán Adrià, widely recognized as one of the world’s best and most creative chefs, says that Brazil has fantastic products and fantastic people, citing you as an example, and praising the work you do to promote lesser-known Brazilian ingredients. Do you consider his work a source of inspiration?
Alex Atala: I admire his work a lot, but my focus is different, it is on showcasing Brazilian ingredients. He opens a world of possibilities for all chefs, but what I have to do is to filter what he does and make sense of it from my Brazilian perspective. Although I have a great working relationship with some of the world’s hottest chefs, like Adrià himself and (England’s) Heston Blumenthal, I am not trying to be a scientist like they are. We exchange knowledge and help each other, without trying to be like one another.

A.F.: What are some of the typically Brazilian ingredients that aren’t often used in restaurants, and why do you think they don’t make it into São Paulo’s best kitchens?
Alex Atala: There are many, many fruits, and wonderful fishes from the Amazon, like the Pirarucu and the Piraíba, which are hardly used in the nicer restaurants. But the greatest example of underused ingredient is the manioc, which is available all over the country, in its many guises – flour, tapioca, etc.

A.F.: Why do you think that happens?
Alex Atala: Well, some of these foods suffer because they are seen as the common man’s food, they have a very humble origin (even though they can become very refined if handled properly). In other cases, the products are just too hard to find in the big cities.

A.F.: How do your fishing and hunting trips influence the way you cook?
Alex Atala: These hobbies you mention have fostered, since I was a kid, an intimacy with nature which has taught me, first-hand, the difference between what’s fresh and what’s not. And that knowledge puts me at an advantage to select the freshest ingredients, and to understand how to preserve their essence during cooking.

A.F.: Now that D.O.M. is recognized in and out of Brazil as one of the country’s top restaurants and you have become a celebrity, what’s next?
Alex Atala: Kicking the ball high up in the air is easy, but keeping it up there isn’t. My goal is to consolidate D.O.M.’s reputation, rather than lose my focus on other projects.