Get your fill of Brazil Expat Sao Paulo pair come together over homeland fare By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Saturday, Mar. 16, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/03/2024 (942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

St. Patrick’s Day falls on Sunday and if you’re a fan of shepherd’s pie, you may be interested to learn that a pair of Winnipeggers could soon be offering their take on the Irish classic, with a decidedly South American twist.

Brazilian expats Giuliano Roveri and Marli Cordella are the owners of Brazilicious, a months-old venture specializing in empadão, a traditional Brazilian dish often referred to as that nation’s ultimate comfort food. While their stuffed, savoury pies, almost four centimetres thick in the middle, typically feature a buttery, flaky crust, the two friends see no reason why they can’t sub in mashed potatoes, if the calendar calls for it.

“In Brazil, every bakery does its own take on empadão, and we’re no different,” Cordella says, seated next to Roveri in a St. Vital coffee shop. Last month, for instance, right around when Festival du Voyageur was kicking into high gear, she challenged herself to conjure a French-Canadian version of empadão.

“She told me she was making tourtière and I was so excited, because that’s something that’s absolutely unheard of back home,” Roveri pipes in. “I took one bite and was like ‘Marli, you nailed it.’”

Roveri, 38, and Cordella, 40, both hail from São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city.

Roveri was a teenage member of the Rotary Club. Through that organization, he was afforded the opportunity to study abroad during his final year of high school. He dearly wanted to improve his English, and chose Canada as his destination, over Australia and the United States.

The River East Collegiate alumnus asks “how Canadian is that?” when he mentions meeting his future wife, whose family was also originally from Brazil, at a Henderson Highway Tim Hortons, a few months into his 10-month stay.

The two kept in touch following his return to Brazil, but eventually drifted apart when she moved to Paris for university. Five years passed until he reached out to her again, after coming across her Facebook account. She was still living in Europe and he flew to the City of Lights, to see her. They lived in Brazil after tying the knot a few years later, then moved back to Winnipeg, in 2017.

Sorry, her story isn’t as romantic, Cordella says with a smile. Her husband had always dreamed about a life in Canada. About 10 years ago, they set the wheels in motion to emigrate to Winnipeg, which had come highly recommended by a friend’s uncle.

“We had heard how cold the winters can be but in São Paulo, it can be a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work, versus 20 minutes here, so you take the good with the bad, right?” says the mother of two sons, ages 12 and 13.

Like scores of people, Cordella had extra time on her hands during the first months of COVID. She’d always enjoyed cooking, particularly recipes that had been handed down to her by her mother and grandmother, so she began spending hours turning out Brazilian entrées for her immediate family, as well as for a few close friends. Reaction was universally positive, to the degree she began renting commercial kitchen space to start a small business, Flour Tomato, that offered contact-free delivery through WhatsApp.

Sales were strong, but when the opportunity to enrol in a two-year English course at Red River College Polytechnic presented itself in late 2020 — “I’d been here five years, but my English was still poor” — she shuttered Flour Tomato, to fully devote herself to her classes.

Around this time last year, Cordella was chatting with a friend of hers named Leandro, who asked if she was planning to resurrect her biz, now that she had completed the course. She was considering it, she told him, except if she did, she would want a partner to help share the load. His response: he might know a guy.

Before catching on full-time with Canada Post, Roveri worked as a cook at various spots, including Stella’s, Original Joe’s and Sage Creek’s Block and Blade Restaurant and Bar. He was sorting mail one morning alongside Leandro, a fellow carrier, when he mentioned how much he’d enjoyed the hustle and bustle of a professional kitchen. Leandro brought up Cordella, and suggested a meeting of the minds. And palates.

“I invited her and her husband over for a barbecue, and as we got to talking, it seemed that our vision was the same: we were both interested in cooking things Brazilians would be familiar with, but that would also appeal to Canadians and people from other cultures,” Roveri says.

Brazilicious officially launched in mid-November with four varieties of frozen empadão: chicken, pulled pork, shrimp and heart of palm. Besides “what the heck is heart of palm?” — it’s an artichoke-like vegetable harvested from the inner core of palm trees — the other most commonly asked question by non-Brazilians is whether their fare is spicy.

In São Paulo, food is generally mild, Roveri tells them, so much so that he was taken aback, the first time he ordered pepperoni on a pizza. “I’m OK with it now, but initially, I was like ‘whoa,’ so no, I wouldn’t classify what we do as spicy, whatsoever.”

Maggie Demarchi is the president of the Brazilian Association in Winnipeg (BRASIW). She moved to Canada from Recife, Brazil, in 2004, and like a lot of expats, missed many of the dishes she grew up enjoying.

“Of course, we can all make empadão, or food offered by other Brazilian businesses like Petit Brigaderia that makes sweets like the famous Brazilian brigadeiro,” she says, referring to what are more commonly called Brazilian fudge balls. “But most people are so busy trying to make a living that there is no time to spend making good food that tastes like home.”

For that reason, Demarchi was over the moon to discover there was a new enterprise in Winnipeg marketing precisely what she’d been craving.

“Comfort food is very important for us… it really fills a void that probably all immigrants feel in their hearts,” she continues. “The majority of Canadian-born people have no idea what immigrants go through to one day call themselves Canadians. Sometimes, we can’t go back home for years, so when eating something that tastes like home, we close our eyes and feel like we are back home.”

On that note, Demarchi should be pleased to hear that Roveri and Cordella have expanded their line to include more Brazilian faves, including carne louca, a braised beef-and-vegetable mix, and feijoãda, a black-bean stew done with beef and pork that is widely regarded as Brazil’s national dish.

“We advertised it on Instagram a few weeks ago and one gal said it had been so long since she’d had it, she wanted to order 10 (stews) in case we weren’t going to make it again,” Roveri says.

Roveri and Cordella hope to establish a retail presence at some point down the road, but for now, they’re content selling their products online (instagram.com/brazilicious.wpg) and at the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market, where they’ve been setting up a booth on a regular basis, since the start of the year. (You can also sample their empadão over a cuppa joe at Mina’s Café & Eatery, a newly opened, Brazilian-flavoured coffee spot in Winkler.)

“The idea is to keep growing, and for this to be my full-time job, one day,” Roveri says.

Back to the topic of holidays; that’s a new one on them, they say, when it’s mentioned International Pi Day fell earlier in the week on March 14 (3/14), a date when science-types around the world toast the mathematical constant, by diving into a slice or two of pie.

“No, I’d never heard of that but I guess in our case, everyday is pie day,” Roveri cracks.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca