Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala

Brazil's top chef puts the Amazon on a plate

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Edu Simoes / The Guardian

In the rain forest outside So Paulo, Atala harvests the tuber manioc.

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It wouldn't be the last time he resisted authority. At 12 he spiked the mulled wine at a Christmas party with psychedelic mushrooms. By 15 he'd left his suburban home for the city, where he worked first in a dive shop and later as a DJ and janitor at a nightclub, squatting in an abandoned building with friends. He cut his red hair in a mohawk, got the first of what would become a pelt's worth of tattoos covering his body from the neck down and started in with illegal substances. "Any kind of trouble a young punk rocker could get into, I got into," he says.

So much trouble that he realized he had to change or risk the self-destruction to which some of his friends had already succumbed. After a brief stint in a European culinary school, he began working in the hidebound kitchens of Belgium, France and Italy, where he felt his peers looking down upon him for his poor French, his unfamiliarity with the finer points of béchamel, his roots in a country unheralded for its cuisine. Despite the kitchens' soaring temperatures, he kept his arms covered; he didn't want anyone to see his tattoos.

Eventually he returned to Brazil and took a job as a sous-chef in an Italian restaurant in São Paulo. It was there that he had his first inkling of how he might come to really love cooking. "I was making traditional Italian food, the same as I had made in Italy," he recalls. "But it wasn't as good because in Brazil you couldn't get the same products. So I started substituting Brazilian ingredients for Italian ones. And that's when I realized I could make these dishes my own."

By 1999 he had opened D.O.M. and was trying to do just that. But critics scoffed at early efforts like a grilled tomato with mango sauce. "People were saying it was crazy, and I was always in doubt, wondering if they were right. I was listening to my heart, but I wasn't sure if that was the right thing to do." Gradually, though, he grew more confident, creating dishes that were profoundly Brazilian but also modern. Josimar Melo, a restaurant critic for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, sees parallels between Atala's cooking and one of Brazil's most famous exports. "I call it bossa nova cuisine," Melo says. "Because what middle-class musicians did with bossa nova--which was to take the samba of Brazil's poor and marry it to jazz to create something new and sophisticated--Atala was the first to do with food."

For a while, Atala lived a divided life, spending working hours serving elegant recipes to his well-heeled clientele and his time off in the jungles and on the rivers of the Amazon, finding relief in hunting and fishing. Then he found a way to bring the two worlds together.

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