Sao Paulo
Chefs Janaína and Jefferson Rueda, whose restaurant A Casa do Porco was just voted 12th best in the world by 50 Best, opened another restaurant in downtown São Paulo, Merenda da Cidade, last week.
The house offers a fixed dish every day. It is steeped in the repertoire Janaína Torres Rueda brings with her from working with lunch ladies in public schools in the state of São Paulo in 2015, training more than 2,000 professionals.
She used to get up early and go to school to demonstrate the preparation of dishes like pasta, pot beef and feijoada — the same concept she’s now using at her new restaurant. The period was not just limited to cooking classes, however, but also served to shed light on the work of anonymous chefs that are vital to the city’s culture and food education.
She opened the project on a site that used to house the extinct Marcel, a São Paulo classic, and which until recently served as a storage facility for the Torres Rueda group.
In the pandemic, she has taken the trouble to set up a delivery kitchen without an architect and took the opportunity to meet the demand for her social actions there. The chef then transformed the same space into a cafeteria for more than 300 employees of the group, which is now open to the public.
The food, served only at lunchtime, is the same as the staff’s a single recipe that varies each day. These are commercial dishes typical of pubs that shaped daily life in São Paulo. For customers, the card is picked up at the window, selfservice is carried out in the house and there is an opportunity to sit at collection tables there are almost 50 seats.
The dish costs R$40 and consists of a fresh salad with organic ingredients from Sítio Rueda in São José do Rio Pardo, a natural juice or a soft drink such as hibiscus with lemongrass sweetened with molasses and a small dessert. Depending on the day there is brigadeiro, chocolate mousse or coconut foam with girl’s drool.
The chicken served with pasta on Sundays is also organic it’s the same as at Bar da Dona Onça. The São Paulostyle turn shown on Monday is a house favorite. Served with rice, bean tutu, cabbage, fried egg with a soft yolk and a spiced banana tartare
Lemon, olive oil, pout and red onions harmonize sweetness, acidity and spiciness.
This combo includes pork: a preservativefree sausage, from Porco Real, the group’s family fridge, and a roast pork, also from their own farm in inland São Paulo, and grown on carrots, beetroot, corn and cheese whey. .
On Fridays, a hearty stew is served as the basis for the fish dish. The fish in sauce with tomatoes, peppers, carrots and potatoes is enhanced by the presence of Farofa palm oil. Saturdays are reserved for the classic feijoada by Janaína Rueda, who is also involved in the recording of Top Chef, the television show where she acts as a judge.
All ingredients are fresh. The jerky is cured inhouse and uses the pork’s loin, foot, tail and ear. There’s also bacon and sausage, both of which are added to the stew, resulting in a thicker broth, like the feijoada at Bar da Dona Onça. Served with banana tartare, coleslaw, orange slices and cassava flour, which comes from Bahia and gives a stir in the skillet to make it more subtle the beans should be shiny.
Tuesdays have steak à rolê with rice, beans, puree and onion farofa (same as A Casa do Porco); Stroganoff on Wednesdays; and on Thursdays homemade pasta with Bolognese sauce.
The only dish offered each day is rice from the country, a vegan variant that takes on different contours depending on what the place offers the freshest.
The preparation begins with sautéing onions and garlic with some tomato, creating a broth in which to cook the rice. It can count on mushroom chips and various types of vegetables. Like zucchini, beets, and carrots, these are cooked at different times and cut into different sizes to decorate dishes.
Textures of the dish, topped off with buds and fresh flowers.
“The basis of the rice is a stew. I name our great stews,” says Janaína. “I added pickled cucumbers to give the acidity, some more cooked, some more roasted.
Depending on what we have available, we make a marinade with sherry vinegar, apple cider vinegar, or soy sauce. It’s fun to play with,” he says.
From the next 13th, the house will be serving sandwiches from 7pm to 11pm combinations with potato chips and a juice, also priced at R$40. with long fermentation and own production, more rustic, with Porco Real ham and Mandala cheese , from Pardinho Artesanal, aged 18 months in the cellar, and tomato.
Other bets are the bread with meat, a firmercrust cassava bread, which is a thin steak, and the pork burger with pancetta, with cheese and potato brioche bread.
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