If the story of Alessandra Montagne were told in a feature film, the screenwriter could be fired for having loaded too much drama. But real life doesn’t have to be believable, and often it isn’t.
Anyone who knows her — even in a Zoom conversation, as was the case in this interview — also cannot imagine that behind that light, warm presence and the wide smile that she often smiles, there is a trajectory so full of pain.
At the age of 45, Alessandra owns three restaurants in Paris. But she is not just a businesswoman in the industry. She is a graduated chef and master pastry chef, who brings to the dishes she prepares both what she learned at school and what she gathered from life.
“My kitchen has zero waste. I make a point of working with producers I know, I only use seasonal products and I don’t buy anything that comes from far away”, he says. “I will always favor local agriculture. I grew up in a small town and I know the value of things, the vegetables that are being planted to feed the chickens, which will lay the eggs that will also serve as food.”
Alessandra was born with another surname, the daughter of a maid in Vidigal, in Rio de Janeiro. At eight days old, she was handed over by her mother to her paternal grandparents, who raised her in the small town of Poté, in the interior of Minas Gerais.
“When they ask me where Poté is, I say it’s close to Teófilo Otoni [município de MG]🇧🇷 If even that doesn’t help to locate it, I say that Teófilo Otoni is close to Governador Valadares”, he says. There was neither running water nor electricity in Poté. Telephone, then, much less.
Alessandra’s paternal grandparents had nine children, the house was always full of people, the older ones ironing clothes that were too small for the younger ones. And Alessandra spent her entire childhood there, playing in the street, standing on the ground. On All Souls’ Day, she and her grandmother would light a candle for their mother, who they believed was already dead.
But one day, when he was 12 years old, a shiny new black car pulled up outside his grandparents’ house. Cars in Poté were rare, and the whole town stopped to see who was coming. The driver got out and opened the back door. “I only saw one leg that got out of the car like that, she was wearing a boot, I remember it like it was yesterday. My heart raced”, said Alessandra.
“I didn’t remember the face, but I knew it was her. And I was very ashamed, I was a skinny girl, disheveled, all dirty with dust. And she was that neat, smelling, well-dressed woman.”
Alessandra gets emotional when she tells me that she never had the courage to ask her mother where she went and what she did during those 12 years. Her mother was already living in Paris when she made this visit. She was married to a Frenchman and had not come to Poté to pick up her daughter, but to see her again and assess whether she was educated enough to move to France.
After 15 days, he came to the conclusion that no. He enrolled Alessandra in a boarding school in Campinas, called Instituto Adventista de São Paulo. “There I experienced the worst situations of racism in Brazil”, says Alessandra. “The other girls asked me why my nose was so wide, why my hair was like that, they said I was very ugly.”
And unlike her peers, all from wealthy families, Alessandra had no one to pick her up from boarding school on long holidays or vacations. She stayed at school on those dates. Often alone. “I was calling my mom asking for God’s sake, let me come back to you, for God’s sake. But she didn’t want me to come back, and I didn’t know what to do.”
At the end of the year, Alessandra took a bus and went to Poté. She was 16, she was a virgin. In the town of two thousand inhabitants where she spent her childhood, that summer, she had her first sexual relationship. And she got pregnant. The grandparents, embarrassed by the situation, forced Alessandra to marry the baby’s father, a man who turned out to be cruel and violent.
Alessandra had her son, André, who is now 29 years old and lives with her in Paris. “Andre was the engine I needed, you know? He saved my life, my son. He is my best friend”, she says.
After the baby’s birth, Alessandra realized that she needed to find a way to work, produce money and, more than anything else in life, draw up an escape plan. “You don’t feel like hugging, kissing, a person who hurts you.”
So, she went to the kitchen, something she had done since she was a little girl with her grandmother. She started making coxinhas to sell outside the school. “Students could smell my coxinha and jump over the wall to buy it, it was crazy”, she recalls. The school principal ended up authorizing her to sell the snacks inside the wall, to avoid accidents.
The money he earned, he saved. It took four years, but Alessandra managed to gather what she needed to escape that situation. “I took a bus from Poté to São Paulo, where an aunt of mine lived, in Itaquera. It was a 22-hour trip, me, my son, a bottle of water for him, the money for the coxinha and a backpack on my back”, he says.
From São Paulo, she made contact with her mother, in Paris, and together they decided that Alessandra would go to France to find a job and learn the language and then take her son with her. “I left André with my aunt and got on a plane for the first time in my life.”
When she landed in Paris, her French stepfather picked her up at the airport and, before taking her home, stopped the car close to the Eiffel Tower and said: “Alessandra, look up.” Not quite knowing what to expect, but not wanting to run the risk of appearing unfriendly, Alessandra did as her stepfather asked.
“And as soon as I saw that tower from below, the blue sky above, it was clear to me that this was the city where I was going to live, this was my destiny.” He needed to work, study and bring his son. “I just had that in mind, everything I did from then on was with the aim of bringing André to live with me.”
But Paris has its distractions. Alessandra began to feel smells that she had never felt before, to perceive flavors that she did not know. “I began to discover the taste, the aroma of berries at harvest time, it is so different to pick a raspberry or a strawberry at the right time. There are many varieties of strawberry, four or five, each with a different smell and taste. Tomatoes, then, have about 20 different varieties.”
And he experimented with mixtures, tested recipes, bought pots and cookbooks, bringing what he had learned in his grandmother’s kitchen to French food. She worked all day at a medical supply company as an assistant, opening packages, checking mail, answering phones.
In France, there is a professional improvement policy that is very different from what exists in Brazil. There, if an employee is accepted into a competitive school, and the boss agrees, he takes a leave of absence to study whatever he wants and continues to receive full salary for as long as the course lasts.
And Alessandra was accepted on a one-year cooking course at the Médéric school, to which she devoted herself completely, body and soul. At the end of the school year, the school offered her a confectionery course of the same duration, which she also took. She left her two years of study with a job at a restaurant, as a pastry chef.
It took a long time before he was able to bring his son to Paris, but he did. When André arrived, Alessandra was already living with a Frenchman she met and fell in love with, and with whom, in 2006, she had her second daughter, Thaís.
In 2012, with some money saved and his personal life at a more peaceful moment, he decided to open his own restaurant. “I wanted a place where everyone could eat well. A simple place, but with good, quality food. And an open kitchen, for the customer to see what I was making.”
The restaurant was called Tempero, and it was located in a neighborhood far from the city’s tourist route. Alessandra’s idea was to stay off the radar of the city’s gastronomic critics while she gained experience in the business. But she didn’t have time.
“There was a queue at the door on the first day. There wasn’t enough food for everyone. I didn’t advertise, until today I don’t know where all those people came from. And it never emptied, it was always like that”, he recalls. “And I don’t think there was a French journalist who didn’t go there in the first month.”
And it wasn’t just journalists. Alain Ducasse, one of the most renowned French chefs in the world, not only visited Tempero right from the beginning, but also approved the food and encouraged Alessandra to settle in a more prestigious area.
Today, the Brazilian has three restaurants in Paris and is writing a book about her life. Tempero is still there, since it was born, ten years ago, but it has become an épicerie, a market for high quality products and a natural wine cellar. Then there’s Dana, a bistro inside a luxurious commercial building that looks more like a five-star hotel, where executives rent suites to work and where she serves super fancy lunches.
And, in 2020, he inaugurated Nosso, his most authorial house, where, at dinner, he makes a tasting menu that tells part of his story. “The first thing you eat is a coxinha, of course, because it was the first thing I sold and what made me realize that I could be proud of myself.”
“Coxinha is a very important part of my history. It was the first stone I laid to make the building I built later”.
I have worked as a journalist for over 10 years, and my work has been featured on many different news websites. I am also an author, and my work has been published in several books. I specialize in opinion writing, and I often write about current events and controversial topics. I am a very well-rounded writer, and I have a lot of experience in different areas of journalism. I am a very hard worker, and I am always willing to put in the extra effort to get the job done.
