It’s hard to find a “backstreet” in Ipanema, Rio’s pricey, posh epicenter of tourism, where real estate is prime and snack bars charge twice the price of grubbier places elsewhere. But leave it to three Frenchmen to open a wine bar that sincerely strives to be – and succeeds in being – a Brazilian boteco in the city’s most iconic beachside neighborhood. The bubbly trio Vava, Laulau and Gerard saw in an old construction supply store near the Ipanema metro stop an opportunity to create an upscale bar with the charm (and, believe it or not, the prices) of a Rio neighborhood eatery.
The menu of rich appetizers is short and compelling: pimentos espanholados (marinated red peppers), salada de polvo (octopus salad), presunto cru salamanca (cured ham), cabra dengosa (goat cheese, seasoned with herbes de Provence) and burrata (a purse of mozzarella cheese filled with cream and curds), served with sliced French bread. On Tuesdays Canastra gets fresh deliveries of oysters from the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina – they’re caught in the morning, flown into Rio and are shucked by the afternoon. Among the wines, we liked the white Don Guerino, a yellow muscat, and the malbec rosé. But most impressive are the prices: a glass of wine ranges from R$8 to $22 (US$2.75 to $7.50), a dozen oysters on Tuesday are R$20 and most appetizers are around the same price.
But just as laudable is the fact that everything Canastra serves is Brazilian, including the caponata, an eggplant dish, from the hills of Petrópolis, a colonial-era hill station outside of Rio; cheese from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, a dairy wonderland; and wines from gaúcho homeland Rio Grande do Sul and nearby Santa Catarina. Gerard says going Brazilian-only means they don’t have to charge over 100 reais for a bottle of imported wine, and they chose prize-winning national ones to keep quality high.
The owners make the scene with their gregarious manner of greeting guests with an ear-to-ear grin and clap on the back, clearly delighted that their bar has taken off. Vava is a designer and also the great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy. Gerard, a photographer, has shot Bruna Marquezine – a Brazilian child actress turned sex symbol whose behind has been voted Brazil’s best. Laulau has previously worked in restaurants in both France and St. Martin, and his day job in Rio is customizing food trucks.
There’s not much to Canastra, which opened in January: a bedroom-sized bar with chairs and tables, which necessarily go onto the sidewalk around it. The concrete-gray interior with an assortment of charming knickknacks, like crab-shaped ashtrays and lush green ferns, was designed by gaúcho artist Jorge Nasi, known for the Paris bar and nightclub Favela Chic.
(We take a break from our food coverage for two cents of cultural criticism here. The phenomenon of “favela chic” has its enthusiasts and eye-rollers, so let’s sink our teeth into what revs us up about slum tourism, favela hostels and – have you heard of this one? – even a faux luxury shantytown hotel. Are we commercializing poverty? If that’s a problem, then is it only appropriate to reproduce the aesthetics of the wealthy? Or are we seeing in a place, usually defined by misery, sources of beauty and inspiration? What would a favela resident say upon seeing an upscale Parisian club inspired by Rio’s informal settlements, and would two favela residents say indeed very different things? Would a Brazilian who earns the minimum wage – about US$250 a month – drop US$90 for a night out? Is it a problem to imitate a culture that is not our own, or do we routinely borrow from cultures we find appealing, in ways that are neither wholly deliberate nor totally meaningless?)
“Brazil is not a serious country,” goes a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle. The quote may be apocryphal, but its bruise on the national ego is not. So we say merci and tchin tchin to the three French gringos who would make a wine bar-boteco in Ipanema. They remind us that multiculturalism is best when it’s a horizontal thing, not when it is imposed but when it is shared.
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