Maní

I have never ordered a tasting menu before.

I have never felt rich enough. Nor, if I am honest, have I ever felt my life to be substantially poorer for the lack of having tried one.

My preferences where food is concerned are pretty vulgar. If the food’s plentiful, tastes good and is mostly healthy, I’m happy as a pig in clover.  

But the experience I had last Wednesday was something else.

Last Wednesday, thanks to the generosity of my father-in-law, I, along with my wife and aforesaid pater familias, tried the tasting menu at Maní, a restaurant that last year (2013) dropped into San Pellegrino’s list of the 50 Best Restaurants in the World at No. 46.

To get there is a short walk into another world: down through Pinheiros, over the six broiling lanes of Avenida Rebouças and into the jasmine-sweet, cash-cleansed air of the Jardins. Seventy metres or so down Joaquim Antunes on the left-hand side, there waits a little courtyard with a folksy wooden doorway wreathed in flowers and an aura of quiet exclusivity that sends the millionaires of São Paulo into a honey-bee frenzy, as can be seen by the way they mill outside in their business suits and elegant dresses, waiting for the valet to bring their enormous four-by-fours or someone important to notice them.

Normally I avert my eyes as I pass by, armoured within a lather of socialist indignation. But last Wednesday we passed through the flower-decked doorway and down the rabbit hole.

And the reason I’m relating all this is not because the food was amazing, although it really was, but because what we ate really might shed some light, for people who haven’t visited Brazil, not only on Brazilian cuisine but on Brazilian culture itself.

The idea at Maní is simple. As with Alex Atala’s internationally acclaimed DOM, which is also here in São Paulo, the intention is to try and rehabilitate Brazilian ingredients and cuisine. The unspoken problem these chefs are tackling is the inherent Euro-centricity of haute cuisine in Brazil, a legacy of the colonial mind-set which insisted that quality was conferred by the stamp of Europe; in the old days, if dining was fine, it was invariably either French, Italian or Spanish.

However, chefs like Atala and Maní’s husband and wife team of Helena Rizzo and Daniel Redondo, are trying to reverse this thinking.

The best way to think of it is as a sort of gastronomic tropicalismo (this interview with avant-garde Brazilian theatre director Zé Celso provides a wonderfully psychedelic perspective on the movement).

It's as if these chefs are telling people: come on, look at this amazing food which is right here and which is ours. Sure, they’ve got their traditions, and they’re fine traditions. But we can’t have cheese like that, or pasta or pastry, because their cooking evolved from a centuries-old process of exploiting the ingredients and technology appropriate to their climates. If we want those things, we have to import them, or imitate them, with all the problems that entails. But now take a look at this. Take a look at our fruit, take a look at our vegetables. Look at the Amazon rainforest and the cerrado and the techniques both ancient and relatively modern (i.e. colonial) by which people have sustained themselves off the land right here. If we make use of those, if we embrace what we’ve got, then we can make up our own tradition, and it will be the equal of anything they do because, hey, let’s face it, we’re Brazilians. 

Well, I’m extemporising a little.

But the point stands: Brazilian ingredients are amazing, and undervalued. The only problem I can see with this gastronomic quest is that most people in Brazil can’t afford to salt their meat with such idealism, while the kind of people who can often can’t afford much in the way of a conscience.

Still, there is a point at which such prevarication must end, and I’d venture that one such moment is when you find yourself sitting at one of the faultlessly elegant tables that waits beyond Maní's flower-hung doorway, in the improbably comforting schizophrenia of a décor that combines rococo chandeliers and antique chairs with terracotta cabanas and vertical gardens, just as an incredibly beautiful plate of food is set down in front of you. Sure, beauty in itself doesn't eliminate the need for political analysis, but maybe it has a right to suspend it for a while, at least until you’ve finished your coffee.

Anyway, I’ve tried to add notes that might lead you off to do your own reading. But where there are new words, you can always google these phrases (say, for example, if you’ve never heard of feijoada), and find lots of helpful info.

The last thing to add is that, from courses two through five, the most almighty storm was passing directly overhead. The thunderclaps were so loud they made the waitress jump (but she still didn’t spill anything), while the roar of the rain on the flat roof above us meant we had to shout to be heard. All in all, a very tropical experience.

Couvert: Pirulitos de parmesão (parmesan lollipops), corn bread, pão caseiro (farmer’s loaf, more or less) accompanied by pots of butter, goat’s cheese and queijo coalho

Dishes:

1. Trio of: bombom de caipirinha de caju (bonbon of cashew-fruit caipirinha, i.e. the national drink of white rum smashed together with various fruits and sugar), oyster and lychee in cucumber roll, a small unknown fish with tamarind paste
Wine: Trappier Champagne (Brut)

2. Ceviche de caju (cashew-fruit raw fish stew) with coriander
Wine: Trappier Champagne (Brut)

3. Langoustine steamed in cachaça served with froth of jabuticaba (the Amazonian fruit that grows on the branches and trunk of the tree rather than hanging off the extremities)
Wine: Amiot Guy et Fils (Cremant de Bourgogne – oaky, dry)

4. Waldorf salad of apple in aspic, emulsion of gorgonzola and celery mousse
Wine: Amiot Guy et Fils (Cremant de Bourgogne – oaky, dry)

 5. Marrow flesh encased in a palmito (heart of palm) ‘bone’ with a spinach salad
Wine: Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi

6. Gnocchi of mandioquinha (baby cassava root) with araruta (arrowroot) steeped in a ‘dashi’ of tucupi (tucupi being the thick yellow sauce made from cassava root that is the basis of much Amazonian cuisine and which is poisonous until it has been boiled for hours due to its high cyanide content; here it was presented as a clear Japanese-style broth or ‘dashi’)
Wine: Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi

7. Fillet of linguado (sole) with bacuri (untranslatable tropical fruit) and a black glittering vanilla oil
Wine: Chablis

8. Moqueca de peixe com mandioquinha (Bahian fish stew with baby cassava root)
Wine: Chablis

9. Escondidinha de carne-seca no purê de mandioquinha com pimento de biquinho (Hidden parcel of dried meat in a baby cassava root purée with a caramelised shards of Little-Beak chilli)
Wine: Tempranillo Roble

10. Deconstructed feijoada with spheres of feijão (beans), croutons, orange, a cannelloni of carne-de-sol (sun-dried meat) and a nest of couve (collared greens fried, in this case, like seaweed)
Wine: Tempranillo Roble

11. Buchecha de boi com farofa de milho e purê de Taioba (beef cheek with a corn flour farofa and purée ofTaioba (taro, a tropical tuber)
Wine: Medalla Real (Chilean Carménère)

12. Raspadinha de mate com mexerica e pitanga (sorbet of yerba mate with tangerine and Surinam cherry)
Wine: Michele Chiarlo Moscat

13.  Pannacotta of coconut with pineapple ice cream and sirop
Wine: Michele Chiarlo Moscat

Though I’ve already delivered them effusively in person, my thanks go once again to my father-in-law for bringing me along for the ride.