Foreign chefs discover national flavors at Festival Fartura in BH

Loaded jabuticaba trees became an attraction as much as works by Inhotim, a museum in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, for a group of foreign cooks. They commented on the sweet explosion in the mouth after the fruit’s thick skin was broken. A tourist jokes that this is how the blueberry would like to be.

The chefs, who took advantage of Saturday morning (12) to visit the space, were invited by Festival Fartura to a series of dinners in Belo Horizonte. It is their first visit to Brazil.

After two online editions, the festival is back in person, in what became Temporada Fartura, with actions and events in all regions of the country and in Portugal.

Concentrated in the month of November, the Temporada Fartura began in Belo Horizonte and in the neighboring city of Nova Lima (between the 8th and 13th), and continues to Lisbon, in Portugal (16th), Brasília (also on the 16th), Florianópolis (17th ), Belém (19th), São Paulo (19th and 20th) and ends in Fortaleza (25th to 27th).

In Lisbon, a dinner and a conversation about Brazilian gastronomy marked the launch of the Fartura – Viver Portugal project, which is expected to take place in April 2023 and seeks to bring the two countries closer together through culture and business.

In Brazil, the events were reformulated when returning to face-to-face activities. In Belo Horizonte, while the street fair got smaller, with six local producers and a program with live cooking demonstrations, there was a series of dinners made by foreign chefs – an unprecedented action of the festival in the capital of Minas Gerais.

“We want to show these cooks that in the interior of the country there is a very significant cuisine”, says Carolina Daher, gastronomic curator at Fartura together with chef Morena Leite. She explains that the title given to Belo Horizonte as a creative city of gastronomy, by Unesco, in 2019, inspired the action.

It is also a return to the history of Fartura, since the Festival of Culture and Gastronomy of Tiradentes began 25 years ago receiving international names to cook in the city. The event in Tiradentes, the first festival of its kind in the country, is the embryo of Fartura, which took over its production in 2009 with a focus on Brazilian food.

The choice of the five international guests was in charge of chef Morena Leite. Among them were three cooks with restaurants in London: the Spanish Nieves Barragan, from Sabor, with a Michelin star; Australian Skye Gyngell, who runs Spring; and the Englishman Chris Leach, from the Italian Manteca.

“It was important for us to bring cooks from England to Nova Lima, which is a city with many immigrants and families from there,” says Daher.

The list is completed by Portuguese Rodrigo Castelo, from Ó Balcão, in Santarém, and Frenchman Patrick Terrien, the number one chef at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.

The troupe’s schedule included preparing dinners at Bravo Catering, in Nova Lima, and at Casa Fartura, in Belo Horizonte. The group also took trips to visit the city’s Central Market and restaurants such as the traditional Xapuri and the sophisticated Glouton, in 68th position in the Latin ranking of the 50 Best Restaurants, in addition to visiting Inhotim.

The meals prepared by the chefs showcased a taste of what they serve in their kitchens across the ocean — with a surprise or two. Skye Gyngell, the Australian from Spring, incorporated ora-pro-nobis and Brazil nuts to one of the dishes she made at Bravo Catering.

For Carolina Daher, the curator, the relationship that Brazil had with its food 25 years ago, when Fartura was still in its infancy, was another. At that time, according to her, the country still didn’t have the “self-esteem” it has now to talk about gastronomy.

“Today, we can bring a chef not only to present his culture, but also to get to know ours. There is an exchange”, he says. “When these chefs are using blueberries there in London, they will be able to say that they ate an incredible fruit from Brazil called jabuticaba from the tree.”