Dona Carmem Virgínia helps design a country kitchen – 11/06/2023 – Food

The eyes of anyone who enters the Altar restaurant, opened in May this year in Vila Madalena, in São Paulo, soon fill with color. There, shelves and niches pay homage to Candomblé, sometimes in syncretic representations, such as that of Cosme and Damião, or with black figures that portray deities such as Xangô and Iemanjá.

Before the house’s chef, Dona Carmem Virgínia, 47, opened her first location in 2014, in Recife, little was known about terreiro cuisine in the country’s gastronomic circuit. Leaving the Santo Amaro neighborhood, in the capital of Pernambuco, she conquered Brazil with her axé food.

“I remade my trajectory. Today I am a prosperous woman, who can earn money and enrich myself and those around me by serving”, says the cook, who, at her São Paulo address, has a partnership with singer Luísa Sonza and businesswoman Fátima Pissara.

Just like in Recife, the São Paulo branch presents itself as a space of devotion, but also displays on its walls elements of Pernambuco popular culture, such as maracatu and frevo.

Not surprisingly, Dona Carmem, in addition to being a cook trained by Senac, is also an iabassê — as the person responsible for the kitchen is called in Candomblé rituals.

He was also in charge of the program Uma Senhora Panela, a series of ten episodes on GNT in which he hosted names such as Criolo, Luísa Sonza and Lia de Itamaracá for a chat while preparing his recipes. A second season of the production should be shown in 2024.

While growing up, Dona Carmem had as a reference her grandmother Edna Amara Mota dos Santos, who raised 9 children and 14 grandchildren and was known for her perseverance in the community in which they lived.

“She wanted me to be called Carmem Virgínia because she wanted her granddaughter to have the name of a predestined person”, says the chef, who inherited the name of a religious leader known to her family, Carmem, and the entity she embodied, Virgínia.

Dona Edna was a white woman who lost her husband, a black man, very early. She then took over the care of the house and children.

“When I talk about the way I was raised, the words my grandmother said, people automatically imagine that she was a black lady”, he says.

Her grandmother, who died four years ago, is always remembered as a reference in Dona Carmem’s life. In the restaurant, at the entrance to the kitchen, a tribute is paid to Edna with a photo of the two accompanied by the matriarch’s chicken cabidela recipe — which has an adapted version at Altar.

The chef remembers her childhood with pride and a smile on her face. This is because, at school, in addition to being a student admired by her teachers, she also wrote love letters for her classmates to send to her suitors with her impeccable handwriting. The small business even earned you a little money.

“He was one of those people who wrote down everything he saw. He had lots of notebooks, stationery”, says Dona Carmem. That’s why the chef even considered becoming a journalist. But halfway through, Candomblé pointed her to another direction: the kitchen.

Having attended a terreiro since she was a child, over time, she rose through the religious hierarchy. At age 23, when she became iabasse, Dona Carmem received the first recognition of her abilities.”

Everyone was impressed inside the yard. Then they started saying ‘why don’t you open a restaurant? Sell ​​this wonderful food!'”, says the chef who is the daughter of Xangô, an orixá who represents justice in religion.

Soon, the success of his food went beyond the limits of that religious space and people started looking for it. Dona Carmem, who had already worked selling health plans and acarajé from door to door, decided to become a professional and study gastronomy at Senac in Recife.

Without abandoning her roots, the chef was responsible for implementing studies on the cuisine of orixás into the Brazilian cuisine curriculum of her course. “Only with Afro-Brazilian cultural education will we overturn racism and religious intolerance,” she says.

A pioneer on the subject, she found obstacles in her path. “I collected some dislikes, I stopped being invited to events because I always made a racial distinction and I always will”, says Carmem.

The cook then built her restaurant in 2014 with R$15,000 and a lot of help from friends and supporters — among them, suppliers who sold ingredients such as green beans on credit. “I was leaving a marriage of 18 years very hurt, with many scars,” she says.

During the pandemic, the chef ventured onto social media to teach healthy and simple dishes to her audience. The spontaneous media was responsible for raising funds and preventing the bankruptcy of Altar Cozinha Ancestral, another victim of the restrictions imposed by Covid-19.

After recovering from the scare, she also took advantage of her close relationships to take the next step: opening the second unit of her restaurant in the capital of São Paulo and creating a new bond with the city.

“I feel like they put a stigma in São Paulo that people here are cold. It’s nothing like that. Here people have big hearts and opened their arms to me,” she says. Today, she serves, among her recipes, many that make reference to offerings from Candomblé orixás.

One of them is eparrei, a greeting to Iansã who gives its name to one of the starters with five acarajés, vatapá, prawns and lambão sauce (R$55). Black-eyed pea fritters fried in palm oil are also associated with the divinity of winds, lightning and storms.

Another option to snack on is Ogunhê, a quartet of feijoada dumplings with bacon aïoli and orange vinaigrette with kale (R$48). Feijoada is commonly associated with the warrior orixá Ogum, related to metals and technology.

But Dona Carmem still has many plans. The main one is to open a little door where she can sell only acarajés alongside her husband, Vevé. “He’s the love of my life, a lifelong friend.”

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Ancestral Kitchen Altar

R. Medeiros de Albuquerque, 270, Vila Madalena, west region, São Paulo @restaurantealtarsp
R. Frei Cassimiro, 449, Santo Amaro, central region of Recife, Pernambuco @altarcozinhaancestral