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Though Brazil is rich in mother earth’s most colorful produce – like passion fruit, guava, papaya, collard greens and sweet abóbora pumpkins – residents of Rio nonetheless have a steady love affair with hot dogs, which are pronounced “HOH-tchee DOH-geey,” or literally translated into Portuguese as cachorro quente. Vendors across the city pile the bunned favorite with a set of toppings as elaborate as they are consistent from one cart to the next: hard-boiled quail eggs, green peas, corn, potato straws, stewed onions and Parmesan cheese.

“Tia” was a young mother of three with a husband whose blue-collar salary as a cop meant life was a hustle in their working-class neighborhood of Freguesia. “I had to take them all to school, prepare breakfast, the school uniforms,” she said. “I got no rest.” Her hot dog vendor days began in 1982, when her daughter was a newborn, and she had what she now says were two decades of busting her chops before the cachorro quente da Tia would become one of the most in-demand snacks in this periphery neighborhood of Rio. “Thank God,” she says of her success in her hot dog business, which now encompasses both a quiosque and a store, with 16 employees in total.

Freguesia is the kind of neighborhood cariocas pass through or around without ever making a point of going to. It’s also the kind of place whose residents other cariocas probably encounter every day: They’re cops, mall saleswomen, personal trainers, the staffers of a city who return to a residential life here in Rio’s West Zone. Tia's hot dog stand, photo by Taylor BarnesThis was once a sparsely populated region that has boomed in recent years, thanks to the arenas of the Olympic Park that are going up 20 minutes from Tia’s hot dog stand.

Many observers of the West Zone expansion of Rio (buyers for the Olympic Village luxury apartments are desperately wanted, if you’re interested) note that the area eschews the organic beauty and traversability of Rio de Janeiro and instead aspires to be as car-dependent as an American suburb. That attracts us to a humbler corner of town, around the corner from the “Pure Island” (yes, that’s the name of the isolated and exclusive Olympic Village complex, which is not on an island). The Largo da Freguesia – the colloquial name for the Praça Professora Camisão – is where neighbors here hang out, a simple plaza where yellow street lights beam bright onto the yellow plastic stools of “Tia” Eny Viera de Matos’s bright-red and steamy stall.

What makes Tia’s dogs so popular are her variations on the dog itself. Her family has established an exclusive relationship with a vendor in the neighboring pastoral state of Minas Gerais to provide chicken and shank dogs. She also avoids some of the frills of the typical Rio cachorro quente and focuses instead on heaping portions of favorite basics: thick amounts of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, crispy potato straws, chopped tomatoes and thinly sliced onions that cook slowly in between the bun and the hot sausages. Clients are also faithful to her secret sauce, a recipe she says she only nailed down a decade after she started out with an aluminum pushcart. The tangy mixture is a reminiscent of the U.S. Southern fast-food chain Chick-fil-A’s “Polynesian” sauce; Tia will only say that it is made with “lots of love.”

The tangy mixture is a reminiscent of the U.S. Southern fast-food chain Chick-fil-A’s “Polynesian” sauce; Tia will only say that it is made with “lots of love.”

A gym staffer with a torso that would make many women swoon at any roda de samba sat down next to the 72-year-old Tia for a deeply personal conversation in hushed voices, before Tia jokingly scolded another client for his pão duro ways: “He’s tightfisted; he doesn’t even buy a hot dog for his girlfriend!” A mother passed by with her timid elementary-aged son in thick glasses, and solemnly told Tia how he had been mute for years due to a dramatic health concern. With the seriousness of a Sunday mass, the mother recounted the first words he produced when his voice came back: “I want one of Tia’s hot dogs.”

Chatting, indeed, is what Tia’s quiosque represents for Freguesia’s tired day laborers when they come back to their cozy homes here. Juliana, Tia’s daughter born the year she started her hot dog cart and now an enthusiastic employee and promoter of the business, says she thinks it has something to do with the Internet age and the loss of people-to-people contact, Tia chats with customers at her hot dog stand, photo by Taylor Barnesthe way people don’t meet their own neighbors even as they are supposedly more connected. “You know, nowadays people are really needy and they need to talk,” she said. “Sometimes they come here not even to eat, but just to sit and talk.”

For Tia, who remembers the days when she would sell 800 hot dogs a day and clients would insist that their snack be made only by her, kicking back and letting a new generation take over has been liberating. Though her staff runs the operation, she comes to the quiosque each night to greet and chat with her regulars. And even after 34 years, she still is enamored with her own product. She’s diabetic, but won’t give up her own dogs and is unconcerned with pretending they are any more elegant than they are. “Even I, to this day, don’t know how to eat one,” she says. “There are people who eat this and don’t even let a single potato straw fall to the ground.”

 

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Taylor Barnes

Published on January 22, 2016

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