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Comprising a city within a city made of housing complexes and self-built neighborhoods, the Maré favela complex in Rio’s North Zone packs 130,000-plus residents into the area between the Avenida Brasil highway and Guanabara Bay, just south of Rio’s International Airport.

Maré originally developed outside government regulation due to Rio’s housing deficit, and both the question of territorial control and a strong cultural identity are historic themes here. Today, rifle-bearing police and drug traffickers can be found in Maré alongside contemporary art exhibits and a slew of social and educational projects. Although known to some in the past as a no-go zone, Maré is also a cultural hub, home to the carnival band Se Benze Que Da, the local newspaper O Cidadão and the first TED event to occur in a favela in 2013, at which former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso spoke.

For the last few weeks, the complex has also been serving as a culinary hotspot, with salmon with coconut milk and caper sauce, shrimp paella, and lamb croquettes with apple-pepper jam among the homegrown dishes vying for the crown in the first-ever Comida de Favela festival, which started September 17 and continues through October 17. The festival is one of several government and civil society initiatives currently aiming to invest in favelas, strengthening social ties and promoting local histories. In recent years, Rio’s urban development community has become more honest about the failures of segregationist policies toward favelas, such as the removal of residents to distant housing projects and warlike police incursions with high civilian casualties. Integrating the favelas into Rio’s wider social fabric is a slow answer to a complex problem, and Comida de Favela displays both its sweat and its joy.

For the September and October food festival, the nonprofit Redes (“Networks”) of Maré identified 16 restaurants with several years of local history and worked with each to perfect a highlighted dish. Dishes compete for the very carioca categories of “best bar food” or “best street food,” with votes from citizen and expert juries. “Working with the cooks, it was clear from their technique that all have spent time in very professional kitchens in the past,” said festival facilitator Camila Souza, who studies gastronomy at Rio’s Unisuam university.

In Maré’s Parque União favela, the restaurant Galeto Dourado is well known in the Roberto da Silveira Street restaurant hub, where live forró, the swingy, accordion-heavy music from Brazil’s northeast, draws dancers from around Rio every Sunday night. But the restaurant’s seafood paella was not familiar to residents before this festival and so rarely ordered, said cook Mariana Moreira. “We chose to highlight the paella so residents would be aware of it. It’s cheap, it’s delicious and it is high gastronomy inside of Parque União.” Nothing featured in thGaleto Dourado's paella, photo by Nadia Sussmane Comida de Favela festival costs more than 15 reais (US$4). Moreira’s version of the Spanish dish is cooked with saffron, white wine, coconut milk, rosemary and brandy from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. She gets the shrimp, squid, octopus and mussels from the North Zone’s famous market, the CEASA.

In a city working to overcome the stigma separating Rio’s favelas from other neighborhoods, one official goal of the Maré festival is, as one organizer put it, “the exchange of experiences.” Local cooks are happy to chat about community life and their careers. Many participating chefs, in addition to having worked in professional kitchens, got started on their own by working in a kind of small-scale restaurant called a pensão, which could be translated as “guest house.” Pensões in Maré and across Rio serve the staple plate, called prato feito, of meat, rice and beans. Some chefs, such as Sonia Oliveira, also gained experience selling quentinhas – to-go boxes of food cooked at home.

Now Oliveira regally presides over the restaurant Sonia’s Gourmet in Maré’s Morro do Timbau favela, and her salmon with seafood caper sauce goes down buttery, with seasoning that is rich but not overpowering to the shrimp and squid. It’s complemented by a velvety, peppered purée of batata baroa, a root vegetable native to the Andes. Oliveira enjoys preparing seafood because it is typical to her home state, Maranhão. Rio’s favelas have been called “arrival cities,” as migrants from Brazil’s rural north often followed relatives to build a new life here; in Maré, their children and grandchildren now live together with more recent immigrants from China and Angola.

Festival organizer Mariana Aleixo told us another Comida de Favela goal is to promote the free circulation of people from inside and outside Maré, and that she would like to see this kind of project in other favelas in the future. Sixty percent of eaters so far have come from inside, said Aleixo, who added that residents may not be familiar with restaurants on the other end of the three-kilometer favela complex. For outsiders, friendly guides who know Maré take festivalgoers to each location in small groups. São Paulo-based designer Bruna Montuori came to Maré this Saturday both for the food festival and to see the contemporary art exhibit “Travessias” (“Crossings”). “To me, it’s about integration,” said Montuori. “This is an opportunity to get to know the community even better than I would by attending a nighttime party. You can bring your family.”

Point do Macarrão, photo by Nadia SussmanIn Vila do João in Maré’s south end, the dish of the day was a lamb croquette with apple-pepper jam. Maré-born Thiago Rodrigues, who founded Point do Macarrão (“Pasta Point”) with his mother, took an executive chef course at Rio technical school SENAC to professionalize his macaroni-delivery-by-motorcycle service. Today he has over 20 employees and is opening two franchises outside of Maré. The croquette, seasoned with white wine and onion, crunches and then melts in the mouth, and the kick of the pepper jam, common in Rio, left us reaching for another. Vila do João, said Rodrigues, “is a part of Maré that doesn’t stop, day or night,” and the croquettes are quickly becoming a neighborhood favorite for a daytime snack or evening accompaniment for a cold beer.

Across the street from Point do Macarrão, the highlighted dish at Buchada’s Bar is chicken with spicy garlic pardo sauce. Other participating restaurants have polished up their Portuguese oxtail soup, typical Brazilian churrasco barbecue, fried sushi rolls, Mexican bean soup, empadinha stuffed chicken pastry and the Cape Verdean corn stew cachupa.

As one slogan of a local social project states, Maré is a complex place. Recent government initiatives in policing the area, including a yearlong, $300 million-plus occupation by the army that ended in June, have left the security situation unresolved. Over the past five years, ambitious government pledges for social investments in Maré, which many residents say are far more effective at increasing opportunity for them than sending in the army, have been dramatically reduced. The Comida de Favela festival was produced with help from the government’s small-business incubator, SEBRAE, and with funding from Itaú bank and the federal Ministry of Culture. It is noteworthy that a modest, well-organized investment in residents themselves has produced an event that has been discussed joyfully for weeks in local press and on social media, and Mariana Moreira says it has already brought new visitors back to her restaurant for a second time.

“Maré is resilient,” said Thiago Rodrigues. “Even as the restaurant expands, I don’t want to move away because my family is here, and my life is here.”

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Nadia Sussman

Published on October 09, 2015

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