Being a vegan would be a lonely business in Brazil if it weren’t for one handy catch – even the beefiest, chicken-heart-gobbling, butter-on-white-bread carioca likes giving his digestive track a day off on occasion. That’s why Jan Carvalho’s veranda-turned Vegana Chácara is popping every weekday at lunchtime. His version of feijoada, the Brazilian national dish, replaces the traditional pork parts that provide the richness in the black bean stew with smoked tofu and shiitake mushrooms. A regular client of his, a musician, jokes that Carvalho’s is the only one he can eat two helpings of and still play soccer afterward. “Eighty percent of my clients are not vegan,” says Carvalho. “They’ll go and eat at a churrasco” – cookout – “afterward.”
But in his garden and veranda, he serves simple and healthful fare. Lunch-goers begin with a bean soup and green salad, the former spiced with pimenta malagueta and the latter with a mayo made from soy milk. Each day there are two options for a main dish, such as vegan cassoulet with soy and shiitake sausage or mushroom stroganoff. Our sweet-but-not-too-sweet tooth perked up with the passion fruit and ginger juice and the blended mango dessert. The cacao mousse tastes like a bowl of earth with a hint of chocolate, and we liked that, too.
Carvalho says his own food is not necessarily saboroso (savory), but that’s not the point. He follows the macrobiotic dietary school, which prioritizes using grains and local vegetables and avoids processed foods and meat products.
If there existed a historian of Rio’s veg-organic counterculture, it might be Carvalho. In the early 1990s, he began making home-cooked vegan, macrobiotic quentinhas (takeaway boxed meals), preparing them in the morning and delivering during the afternoon so he could be home with his young son. (His bond with his son from this time, Carvalho jokes, led his son to call him pãe, a mixture of the words for mom and dad.) He went on to work in a series of restaurants, a bakery, an organic co-op, a natural foods store and Rio’s Vegetarian Social Club, now a landmark in the posh neighborhood of Leblon. What was once a fringe movement with quentinhas, Carvalho says, is now commonplace among health-conscious cariocas, who love experimenting with everything and anything alternative as much as they love a traditional skewer of beef nibs at a churrasco.
And as the carioca goes, so do the Brazilians from the rest of this 3.3 million square-mile landmass. “Rio is a place that forms opinion in Brazil,” said Carvalho, citing dress and food trends that spread through popular telenovelas, which are often filmed in the city.
A stream of quiet diners makes its way to the modest residence on a homey side street of Botafogo, a high-end neighborhood with traffic jams from South Zone residents moving in and out of the beach neighborhoods that surround it. Many of Carvalho’s clients come from the nearby office building of the electrical company Furnas, which employs 4,000 people. With its quiet, white-walled garden with graviola (soursop), mango, banana and star fruit plants, a potter’s shed and a hammock that Carvalho invites guests to nap in, Vegana Chácara offers a moment to be both in and out of the city that we find, indeed, very saboroso.
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