The chef
A path through France, Croatia and Paraty.
Águas de São Pedro, at eighteen
I started cooking professionally at eighteen, through a five-month course at the Grande Hotel in Águas de São Pedro, run by Senac. At the end of it, they hired me. I was the first woman in the hot kitchen at that house. I stayed a year, then moved back to Campinas for a gastronomy degree at Universidade São Francisco and work at Palma Plaza.
France, 2014–2022
An exchange took me to the Côte d'Azur, to a hotel with one Michelin star. Six months of stage, then an invitation to come back — which I did.
In Paris, I worked at Jules Verne, inside the Eiffel Tower. The restaurant is Alain Ducasse's — one of the chefs with the most active Michelin stars in the world. I didn't get the job through a formal CV: a friend said someone had been let go, I called the chef directly in whatever French I had, was asked in the next day, started that week. Four months was the average stint — everyone left early. I stayed.
Then came Spoon, built around the Silk Road — a menu spanning North Africa to India. That's where I learned to cook with spices and techniques outside the classic French vocabulary.
Autour de la Table
Alongside the restaurant work, I joined a project by Ateliê Médicis and France Habitation, in a building being renovated in a marginalised neighbourhood. We built a kitchen on wheels from reclaimed material. Twice a week, open dinners: residents, artists and politicians at the same table. Food from the home countries of the families — Algeria, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal. The project was called Autour de la Table — Around the Table.
Croatia
My last job before coming back to Brazil was at a boutique hotel on Hvar, ranked among Croatia's top three. The proposition was a surprise menu for guests staying ten days — five different starters, five mains, five desserts in sequence, without repeating anything. Local product, creativity on tap.
Paraty, now
Today I cook in Paraty. No restaurant. I come to the client's villa, the rental house, the inn, the yacht. I buy the ingredients myself — the morning of the service, at the municipal market or at the open-air market. My specialisation is meat and vegetables; the rest enters when it fits the menu.
A lineage
My mother, Maria, was born in 1961 in Campo Grande. My grandmother, Anair, came from Paraguay — Pedro Juan Caballero. She spoke Guaraní, and had to hide that she did. My mother, by then in Campinas, spent the nineties teaching cooking to women in the northwestern outskirts — Satélite Íris, DIC, Floresta, São Luís — under the idea that cooking well was a path to autonomy. I followed those classes from age ten. Much of what I do today started there.