Zenilda Lopes Bezerra or Dona Zena or Zeninha - Your Choice

In yesterday's post on Flavors of Brazil, we highlighted the recent coronation of a dish of meatballs as Fortaleza's favorite casual dining dish in the annual national competition known in Brazil as Comida di Buteco. Among the 16 bars, botecos and restaurants that entered dishes in the competition, which is voted on by diners themselves, not by professional judges, Dona Zena was the clear winner with her recipe for meatballs, perfectly seasoned and simply fried.

As mentioned in the earlier post, Dona Zena's triumph in the Comida di Buteco competition wasn't the first recognition this hard-working woman has received. She recently shared her recipe for meatballs with a national television audience in Brazil, and at that time, an extensive interview with Dona Zena was published in Fortaleza's best daily newspaper, O Povo.

Dona Zena with happy customers

Though her full name is Zenilda Lopes Bezerra, she's known to most of her customers as Dona Zena, and that is the name her restaurant has had in all the years of her existence. To her family, and close friends (including many faithful customers of the restaurant) she's simple Zeninha (an affectionate diminuitive meaning "little Zena"). Now 65 years old, she's still at the restaurant every day, where she's assisted by her only daughter, Paula. She's been married for more than 30 years, and tells all that she is "a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and only then a cook."

In the interview Dona Zena spoke of her joys and sorrows during her life, and what the restaurante means to her and to her customers. Here are some excerpts from that interview (translation by Flavors of Brazil):

On her childhood and upbringing:
I was born in Quixadá (a small town in the interior) in 1947. My story is difficult, we were a humble family. I was the backbone of my family. I am the daughter of parents who separated, and as the oldest child, it was I who raised the younger children. Including me, we were eight children.
When my mother brought the children to live in Fortaleza, my father stayed in the interior, he never took much care of us. He found another woman there and my mother remarried here. Now both of my parents are dead, but of my father nothing remains but the name.

How her restaurant got its name:
[At the beginning] it had no name, it was just a corner bar... Then its name became Zen. One day a man stormed into the restaurant shouting, "Look, didn't you know there's a restaurant named Zen on Barão de Studart Avenue?" It turned out even though my restaurant was older than the other Zen, he had registered the name and I hadn't. I was so sad, but a customer of mine said to me, "Just put an -a on the end of the name and turn Zen into Zena." So I did, and now we've had this name for 20 years.



Her recipe for meatballs:
It was a gift from God, really. One my customers, pregnant at the time, worked nearby at Teleceará. One day she said to me, "Zeninha, I had a dream that you made meatballs for me made this way..." and told me the recipe. I replied, "Woman, I've never made anything like that in my life. Are you crazy? I only know how to make steak. I've never tried anything like that recipe." But then Chica, my assistant in the kitchen, picked up some ground meat and finely chopped up the vegetables just like in the dream. Man, it was pure love on a plate. If you put your trust in God, it'll work out. Making meatballs without eggs, without breadcrumbs, nobody cooks that way. Just here at Dona Zena.


Her hopes:
For peace, no? For my daughter to be happy. I don't ask for anything for myself, no. I live through and for my daughter. Everything I have belongs to her. Money is good, for sure, but it's not everything. I know how to make money. My only worry is being the best at what I do.

The Word Is Getting Out - Brazilian Food in the English Press

Last week the highly-respected British newspaper, The Guardian, published a lengthy article on Brazil's new place at the forefront of the world's gastronomy. The article, entitled Brazil: nuts about food was wWritten by Susan Smillie following a trip she made to Brazil, the article covers suchs topics as celebrity chef Alex Atala and his 4th-ranked in the world São Paulo restaurant D.O.M., Brazil's ongoing love affair with the boteco, a bar where you can find good beer, good snack food, and often great live music. She also discusses how the country's leading and most-creative chefs are turning their focus from imitating "continental" cuisine to explore the bounty of native ingredients, techniques and dishes.

Many of these topics, we're proud to say, have been extensively covered in the three years of Flavors of Brazil's existence. We're also very happy that Ms. Smillie used Flavors of Brazil as a reference source for her article, and included several links to posts on this blog in the online edition of her article. Click here to be taken to the Guardian's website and the article.

Flavors of Brazil - Ahead of the Curve?

Last year, in this post, Flavors of Brazil commented on the increasing popularity in the Northern Hemisphere of an Amazonian fruit called açaí. Our point in that post was that even though the fruit was totally unknown outside Brazil until just a few years ago, it had suddenly begun to pop up everywhere - in health food stores, at Whole Foods and Whole-Foods clones, for sale online and by way of multi-level marketing schemes (MonaVie). Even if  scientific evidence did prove that the dark-purple berry with the earthy, almost dirt-like taste was at least somewhat nutritionally beneficial, super-extravagant claims were being made in the marketplace about açaí. It was being touted as a "superfood" and in various places was claimed to cure, among other things, obesity, attention-deficit disorder, autism, arthritis, Alzheimer's disease and erectile dysfunction.

Flavors of Brazil asked in that post last year whether the hyping and marketing of açaí had "jumped the shark", that is to say, reached the point of ridiculousness. The spur for our question was Absolut Vodka's introduction of an açaí-flavored vodka. Well, what was news here at Flavors of Brazil back in 2010 has now become the topic of a very interesting article in the May 30 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Written by John Colapinto, the article is entitled Strange Fruit, and significantly subtitled The rise and fall of açaí.

Colapinto traces the rise of açaí over the course of the past quarter-century. Until the 1980s the berry of the açaí  palm was a food source only for riverside dwellers in the Amazonian rain forest. During the 80s and 90s the popularity of açaí spread first to the big southern cities of Brazil, like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and then to the rest of Brazil. Its move into the USA was largely the work of two brothers from Southern California, Ryan and Jeremy Black and a friend, Edmund Nicols. They had discovered the fruit while travelling in Brazil and thought there was a market for it in the USA. They began to export açaí to the USA in the early 2000s under the brand name Sambazon (from samba + Amazon). Today, Sambazon is the market leader in the USA in açaí products, with annual sales of around $50 million.

The article does ask the same question that Flavors of Brazil wondered about last year. As Colapino puts it, "the fruit has followed a cycle of popularity befitting a teen-age pop-singer, a Miley Cyrus-like trajectory from obscurity to hype, critical backlast, and eventual ubiquity." Trying to find out whether açaí had in fact now gone from boom to bust, Colapinto interviewed Karen Caplan, the C.E.O. of Frieda's, a Los Angeles firm that markets exotic fruits and vegetables, and which is responsible for the introduction, renaming and eventual enormous success of kiwi fruit. Ms. Caplan pointed out to Colapinto that all food products have a life cycle, and that it had taken twenty years for the kiwi to become a best-seller. Açaí has only been exported from Brazil for about half of that time. So does Ms. Caplan think that açaí is over? She says, "No way. I walk into a produce department and see five brands that have açaí in it. And I go to the nutritional stores and I see supplements and a big banner saying 'Açaí' Then I say, O.K. it's starting to get mainstream."