"I don't know if I'll be able to... tell this history or be precise in English." "But, um... in... in my dark time... one day I took a very strong... acid." "And during that trip, I understood the meaning of life." "But, of course, the trip ended and my knowledge disappeared." "And the question "What is the meaning of life?"" "was annoying me." "One night, I had a dream." "I was walking in the street like a kid who has the hands of the father and mother, someone bigger guiding you." "And I was asking to this big person, "What was the meaning of life?"" "He showed me circles." "Circles of life." "And then he showed me a flower." "Why?" "A plant has a circle." "A seed becomes a plant that has a flower, transforms into a fruit." "The fruit drops." "There's another seed... and the seed grows again." "This is a circle." "And I said, uh..." ""I see." "I understand." "But why did you show me the flower?"" "And he said, "The flower is the moment that we live, the most beautiful moment of the circle." "The most beautiful moment." "Contemplate this."" "Twenty years ago, eating out in São Paulo meant going to a French or Italian restaurant." "Going to a good restaurant was something for the wealthy." "It wasn't widespread, because people ate mainly at home." "Rice, beans, farofa and steak." "Maybe Brazilians didn't want to think of their cuisine as restaurant food, as a cuisine that has gastronomic value, a cuisine worthy of the ritual of dressing up, getting ready and going out to eat." "Alex Atala appeared, bringing the possibility of a more modern Brazilian cuisine." "Alex is a supremely gifted individual." "Simple as that." "He is one of the world's best chefs, and I think what makes him different than everyone else is, like... being a chef is just one part of who he is." "He's some kind of strange, new, millennial renaissance man." "He's a hunter and angler." "He knows nature." "He knows the jungle." "He went to the Amazon." "He noticed that Amazonic ingredients were very different from what people knew in Brazil and abroad." "By combining this Amazonian background and his jungle knowledge with classic French techniques, and also being open to the European avant-garde, he made a mix that became a very strong personal message." "He's just got that Brazilian, like..." "swagger." "I mean, Alex does not give a fuck about expectations from other people." "And he's gonna do what he wants to do." "You see that in the food, and I admire that tremendously." "From the moment he realized he needed to be a Brazilian chef, and that D.O.M. had the potential to be the first great modern Brazilian restaurant, he managed to find his place in the 21st century." "He is the international ambassador of Brazilian cuisine." "Do you have a piece of wood?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Here you go." "The entire duck skin for you to use." "Thank you." "Thank you, too." "Behind every dish there is death." "And people only close their own eyes to it." "One of my first memories... to taste and also cook, was with my father and my grandfather." "In the old days, as a kid, we used to travel to remote areas in Brazil and go fishing and hunting in Amazonas, Pantanal, Atlantic Rainforest..." "And it was mandatory..." "if you kill a fish, if you kill something, to clean the fish and eat the whole entire animal." "It didn't matter what we killed." "This was maybe my first relation with food, and cooking as well." "It was a way to respect... that life... and teach... how we might respect the natural environment and just take what we need to eat." "We are not God." "We are a tiny, tiny, tiny part..." "of nature." "Amazing." "Alex, do you know this?" "It's known as mint of cabocio." "No, I don't know it." "It is from the same family as the mint, and the aroma is great." "Piperaceae." "Piperaceae." "Amazing." "Piperaceae." "What would it go well with?" "It's sweet." "This could pair with anything." "It's an amazing ingredient." "Let's pick some." "Palmito juçara." "This will make the heart of palm grow bigger." "This species is very important." "I am happy to see heart of palm here." "When you see Alex, he will never tell you," ""You have to eat at my restaurant."" "It's always, "Let's get lost in the jungle."" "I mean, I think Alex is trying to save the rainforest." "Showing the value of all the natural resources, the farmers, and the indigenous Indians, all the stories that are not being told, they're his story." "Since my childhood, the possibility to enjoy nature, this has always fascinated me." "Appreciating every single leaf, insect, or a bird, or a fish..." "Going to Amazonas, it is something that comes deep from my heart." "But everybody who loves Amazonas, who enjoys Amazonas, who has been to the Amazonas, is afraid about the future." "Amazonas is under a huge pressure." "We need to understand the way that we have been producing food in South America and Brazil is sterilizing entire ecosystems." "But indigenous people, they have been living in the Amazonas for years." "Centuries." "And they still have a balance." "Natural conservation, preservation of Amazonas is not only protecting the river, or the sea, or the forest." "It is protecting the men who live inside." "And I do believe that we can learn something from them." "Manaus!" "Amazonas!" "Brazil!" "This is where it's at." "Game over." "I remember very well my first taste of caviar." "I said, "I don't know if that's good."" "I remember very well the first day that I tasted tucupi, the juice of manioc flour." "And I said, "Wow." "This is... this is a new flavor." "I don't know if I like it."" "But if caviar is fancy..." "and tucupi is not fancy, it's just because someone told me." "There's a cultural interpretation of flavors." "Eating insects for our culture is something not good." "It's linked with misery..." "with hunger and starving." "A few years ago, I went to Amazonas, and I was introduced to the best chef in a tiny village, an indigenous woman called Dona Brazi." "And she did a dark sauce with lots of ants inside." "She gave it to me and I said, "Wow." "Lots of ants."" "But I was..." "So I took the spoon, and I just take the dark sauce." "I tasted the dark sauce, and it was beautiful." "A beautiful aroma of ginger and lemongrass." "And I know that in Amazonas we don't have lemongrass and ginger." "So I ask Dona Brazi, "What kind of herb did you put inside?"" "And she said, "Ants."" "I said, "Okay, I can see the ants." "But there's an herb."" "And she said, "Ants."" "And I repeated the question, and she said, "Stop." "Taste the ants."" "I taste the ants, and the aroma of ginger and lemongrass was really strong." "Wow!" "It exploded in my mouth, and I said, "Wow!" "This is something new."" "If you close your eyes, it tastes delicious." "It tastes like lemongrass." "It really does." "It's... it's remarkable." "It shows you good food is really more than just, sort of, your background." "If you keep an open mind, you can make delicious food just about out of anything." "I'm born and raised in a workers' area." "It's part of São Paulo." "My father used to work in the rubber industry and my mother used to be a seamstress." "My mother and my father have black hair and dark skin." "My three brothers have black hair and dark skin." "And for some reason, I was born slim, white, with a ginger head." "Nobody was like this." "I was the different guy." "I felt alone." "I was trying to understand myself." "I always loved music." "I've always loved rock and roll." "In that time, "hippies" are super trendy, but I didn't identify really myself with the hippies." "And one day, I went to a concert, and that was a punk rock band." "I saw the people and said, "Wow, this is so cool."" "A few of them had ginger hair." "I'm born like this!" "I became completely fascinated." "I said, "This is what I want to be."" "At that time, I was 14, almost 15." "I was angry." "I decided to leave my family house, live on my own... and I started to work in a club." "As a young guy living on my own, making my own money," "I could do whatever I wanted." "Drugs, sex, everything I wanted to have, I could..." "like this." "Drugs are not forbidden because they are bad." "Drugs are forbidden because they are good... but fuck you." "So I went maybe too deep in drugs." "And I did, uh, bad things." "This is my dark time." "I was not against nothing... but I was looking for something." "In 2003, I decided to buy a farm up north in Amazonas." "That was a crazy idea, but I decided I want to help people there." "If I start producing tucupi and sell it in my restaurant," "I can make more money, and so I can pay more local people." "Everybody gonna be happy." "I was feeling myself... the fucking clever guy." "I could save Amazonas in that moment." "So I decided to send food for them." "And I went back after six months... and what I saw was plastic bags... and cans everywhere." "And I became upset." "And I started to explain to them, "How can they do this?"" "And they became really upset with me." "And we had a big argument." "And one of the oldest men from this community faced me and put the finger to my nose and said," ""Alex, this is your fault." "Packaging of fish is a scale." "Packaging of vegetables is skin." "I throw away."" "In that moment, I realized who was sending plastic and cans to them." "Me." "And I started to feel very bad." "Maybe even worse, ignorant." "This was the key to build a project called ATA." ""Ata" means fire in one of our native languages, which is Guaraní." "ATA's mantra is to understand better our relation with food." "Food chain, in this moment, can be a very powerful weapon to support natural conservation." "The Baniwa people, they have more than 70 varieties of chili." "The chili is very meaningful for the Baniwa people." "Under their own tradition, when a young girl gets married... the first gift from her mother is chili seeds." "And they plant, and they harvest without over-pressuring nature." "But it's important to understand... nowadays, women work planting food, and men work in... not so good activities, like illegal mining, because they didn't have jobs." "And mining takes them far from their families." "So our first project was the chili powder." "We have built small houses to process the chili." "We have five already working." "We are building two more." "One of the preparations that they have with the chili they call jiquitaia." "Jiquitaia is a variety of chilis, dried." "It's delicious." "We use it in many different ways in D.O.M." "I think it gives us an advantage." "The pepper is ours." "It is part of our culture, and it can never be taken away." "Our thought was to find something we could bring to São Paulo, and spread a little bit more their culture, and give economic opportunity to the Baniwa tribes, and support natural conservation." "I remember I was working in a club." "Fascinated by punk rock," "I started to think, "How was the life, the punk rock life, in Europe?"" "So I save a little money, and one day, I decided to make my dream." "Go to Europe and see and live." "That culture that was fascinating me." "From my very first step in Europe, I was living a dream." "Everything was new, and I decided not to go back to Brazil." "But, in that time, I had two problems." "First one, make money." "So I start to work painting walls." "And the second, get a visa." "One of the guys who was painting walls was doing chef school." "I said, "Nice way to have a visa."" "So I went to chef school." "To be clear..." "I didn't decide to be a chef." "My visa pushed me to be a chef." "Can you imagine, the end of '80s, Brazilian guy, punk rocker... in a French, or Belgian, or Italian kitchen?" "It wasn't easy at all." "But because of my family background," "I knew how to pluck a bird or clean a fish." "This is something that I had been doing as a kid." "And it was much more fun working as a chef... than painting walls." "Year by year, I started to fall in love with this profession." "All this work just to get the scale off." "Fuck." "It's a hard pirarucu fish." "Careful with your hand." "The knife is moving fast." "I can only imagine the sensation of fishing one of these out of the water." "One?" "I have three at home." "When we are training to be a chef... we learn that the most important moments of our day will be mise en place... prepping all the ingredients... to make an amazing dish." "There is a Brazilian chef called Roberta Sudbrack, and she used to say something that I love." ""Our mise en place doesn't start in the kitchen." "It starts on the farm..." "and in nature."" "If we want to do delicious food, we need amazing ingredients." "To find those ingredients, we need to find another person who loves that ingredient as much as I love it." "About ten years ago, I was working in the restaurant, and someone said, "Alex, there's a guy outside who wants to talk with you about rice."" "And he said, "Please, can you taste this?" "We are producing a new variety of rice."" "And that was the black rice." "Is this black rice?" "Yes, this is its flower." "How beautiful." "When they decided to plant black rice, people started to laugh and said, "Those guys are nuts." "They are planting black rice in a country where everybody only eats white rice."" "I saw it and said, "Wow, this is beautiful." "Let's cook it!"" "And we cooked it, and the taste was incredible." "We started to use it, and they became a kind of, uh... inspirational model for other producers." "Wow." "This one has some plastic on top to make it easier for us to open it." "We have more than 300 different types of bees in Brazil." "The honey's beautiful." "Oh!" "Tastes are completely different." "But in Brazil we only use European honey because the water level is quite low, so it's a stable ingredient." "But our honey is a live ingredient, as alive as... wine and cheese, so fermentation happens and acidity comes up." "So you have a beautiful balance between flavor, aroma, acidity, and sweetness." "You will taste an acid taste because of the fermentation." "The taste is sensational." "There are many ingredients like this that, as Brazilians, we should be proud of." "To the bees." "They are beautiful, and natural, and native to Brazil." "A chef can be a leader." "Looking for ingredients, connecting people, it is the way to build a better food chain." "So after chef school," "I was living in Italy with a Brazilian girl called Cristiana." "I was working in a kitchen." "And Cristiana got pregnant." "We are living in Milano." "It's an amazing city." "It's beautiful." "But it's not home." "It's not me." "Living in Europe made me realize..." "I don't want to have an Italian son." "I want to have a Brazilian son." "My background, my origin, my culture." "Living in Brazil, it is my reality." "It is my soul." "It is my truth." "So we decided to go back to Brazil." "We went to the beach, and I entered with him, with this tiny, tiny, tiny boy in the sea." "This is an important thing for me." "My kids need to touch the ground, recognize the salt of the sea or the sweetness of the Amazon." "This is part of my life." "This is..." "This is stronger than me." "The most meaningful ingredient from Amazonas is cassava." "Some people call it yuca." "For us Brazilians, mandioca." "In English, manioc." "It is the same ingredient." "The only single ingredient you can find in all social classes, the richest and the poorest, is manioc." "Under Brazilian tradition, what we do is peel it grate it... press." "When you press, a kind of milk comes out and the starch comes down." "In our native language, the starch of manioc is called tapioca." "It's funny because the whole entire world, even in Brazil... when thinking about tapioca, suppose that it is Asiatic." "No." "Tapioca is Brazilian." "Mmm-hmm." "With salt." "It's good with salt, right?" "Mmm-hmm." "We have tapioca and we have the juice." "Fermented, it becomes tucupi." "The pulp becomes manioc flour." "It takes a while to roast and to get it right when it's very dry." "But it is looking pretty." "With those three products, we can start designing many dishes." "I do believe that I need to keep my eyes open, ears open, heart open, mind open..." "Learning from nature, local people, the natives..." "This is what keeps pushing me." "So I left Europe and I went back to Brazil, and I started to work in kitchens in fine dining places." "And having a tattoo was not so good." "In Brazil and everywhere, it was shameful." "So I started to work covered." "I was not showing my tattoos." "In that time, important chefs and important restaurants in Brazil were only serving Italian and French cuisine." "French chefs were the gods in Brazil." "Nobody was really interested in Brazilian cuisine." "We have a kind of inferiority complex." "So I received a proposition to work in a new place." "Italian cuisine, very focused on pasta." "But I knew that that food was not as good as the same recipe tasted in Italy." "It was a very bad adaptation." "The food had no soul." "After four years, I was working in a French restaurant." "I met a French chef called Erick Jacquin." "One day we were working in the kitchen, doing a very classical French cuisine." "Erick called me and said, "Alex, sit with me." "You are a good chef." "You know how to achieve the flavor." "But you're never gonna make French food as good as I do."" "We were talking about a cultural background." "And I became upset." "I felt very bad." "I went back home and I took off my T-shirt, and I looked in the mirror and said," ""I'm a tattooed man." "I am an outsider." "I am Brazilian."" "This is who I am." "If I was different, I wanted to be different." "If I'm not able to make a French dinner as good as a French chef, nobody could do a better Brazilian dinner or a Brazilian experience than me." "So I started to switch some ingredients." "I took flounder and I served it with a passion fruit farofa." "And people loved the dish." "That was my moment." "And I decided to make my own restaurant, which is D.O.M." "And I decided to cook only something that comes deep from my heart..." "Brazilian cuisine." "When people come to D.O.M., we propose to them a Brazilian experience." "So every single detail, music, decoration, architecture..." "It is Brazil." "The menu at D.O.M." "takes you on a journey through Brazilian cuisine." "People who go to D.O.M." "have to be open to seeing Brazilian products treated as delicacies." "Our chef's suggestion for lunch time since the very first day of D.O.M. is Workers' Food." "The chef has managed to be subversive." "He managed to make the elite eat rice and beans." "But the presentation is so sophisticated and done with context, people feel authorized to like it." "They don't need to be ashamed of liking it." "It is not necessary to use expensive ingredients." "The luxury is in your hands, in your ability." "This is luxury." "The human capacity to transform something into emotions." "There are surprises, provocations, ruptures." "So it's not a completely safe experience like it would be at a traditional restaurant." "The idea is to challenge people... make them feel slightly uncomfortable." "When I serve something that you say," ""I don't think that I'll like this," or, "It's so weird..."" "This strange feeling is what makes us push the boundaries of what it means to be a Brazilian." "This is to push you to the edge of flavors." "We don't do that to be delicious." "We do that to be "Wow!"" "When I opened D.O.M., a young Brazilian chef using Brazilian ingredients, doing Brazilian cuisine, people started to think, "Alex, you're crazy."" "The very beginning was not easy at all." "The first years of D.O.M... nobody, really nobody, came to D.O.M." "People didn't respect Brazilian cuisine." "It was a tough moment in my life." "But, I was really believing..." "So, in 2005, I decided to go to Madrid, Spain... for a chefs' conference called Madrid Fusión." "Madrid Fusión was the..." "the be-all, end-all for chefs, so..." "And it was big shit." "Big, big, big, big stuff." "I said, "Okay, what message can I pass to European people from a young chef who works with Brazilian ingredients?"" "So I started to think, "What is the flavor from Amazonas?"" "I decided to show a concept that I call Amazonic terroir." "I knew that everybody knew hearts of palm, but just in cans." "Fresh hearts of palm was something really new for them." "I took a kind of log and with a big knife, cleaned it and showed this beautiful, white heart of palm." "I was claiming something Brazilian." "People were fascinated." "Ferran Adrià comes up to the stage." "Ferran Adrià is without a doubt one of the most important chefs ever." "And if he gave you approval, then the whole world would be like, "Of course, obviously."" "And I think that's sort of what happened." "A mythical chef on my stage during my demo." "I became so proud." "That was the turning point of my professional life." "At this point, in Brazilian cuisine, chef Alex Atala started to play an important role internationally." "All of this helped Brazilians feel pride in their own culture." "I left Brazil with a kind of shame to be Brazilian." "And I went back to Brazil much more Brazilian than I ever could have imagined in my life." "When I talk to Brazilians about Alex Atala, they're just proud that he's done it." "That he's risen to this level, and he's done it with dignity, and he's done it in an uncompromising way." "Today, he has an important presence speaking out for farmers, landowners, craftsmen..." "He's speaking out politically, so that people can create a more productive food chain." "I don't think that all chefs must go to the forest or deep in the sea to understand the ingredient better." "That was my truth." "This was my way." "So I start to understand the whole chain of food... is not only the inside of the kitchen." "It is where and how this food has been produced." "This is the circle." "When I was a young guy," "I was just trying to understand myself better." "But I was looking for something." "And at 47 years old..." "I'm still looking for the same." "Now I'm trying to put focus and all of this energy that I still have, these emotions, these feelings, this anger... to show to Brazil that Brazilian cuisine is a possible dream, to show to the world the Brazilian soul." "And I believe that exchange, learning, being open, it is... it is the key." "In the old days, when we were punk rockers, we used to carry a pen or something, or a spray, and painting everywhere "punk rock."" "I really liked to make a drawing of a crazy punk rocker." "A very angry guy." "Years and years later, I was writing my first cookbook." "I said, "Fuck, I was a punk and I became a chef."" "This is life." "And I started to draw the same things I used to draw when I was a punk rocker, but instead I drew a happy, happy, happy chef." "This is the circle." "This is my life."