Manu Buffara: ‘I want my new restaurant to be like Fäviken’

You have to wonder where chef Manu Buffara gets her energy. With her eponymous restaurant Manu in Curitiba, Brazil, constantly being reinvented, and with six different projects under her foundation Instituto Manu Buffara leading a transformation of the food system in the city, the Brazilian chef is about to open another restaurant.

Manu has been open for 14 years, during which time it has grown and evolved, just as the chef has. Today Manu serves a tasting menu based on the theme of immigration. Buffara meticulously researched the history of immigration in the region and presents all the cultural influences in a menu that is vegetable-forward and excludes red meat. The chef’s cuisine is pared back and precise, in contrast to the modern Brazilian cuisine of abundance.

Not content with all of this, Buffara is about to embark on a brand new restaurant. An opening date has not yet been set, but we do know the restaurant will be called Ella and will be an immersive experience that will allow guests to reconnect with nature.

“This is really fresh but it has always been one of my dreams,” says Buffara. “My dream was to build a restaurant and open it four times a week for breakfast. It has always been my dream to serve a nice breakfast.

“You can see at Suryaa hotel [of which Buffara is a partner], I do fresh sorbet with no sugar. I love breakfast. For me it’s the most important meal. So, I want to have a restaurant, where you can have dinner and then you can sleep there. There is a really nice view there, you can see the mountains, and then you have breakfast.”

Buffara has been operating at the very pinnacle of fine dining in Brazil for well over a decade and as she has grown, she has realized that her restaurant Manu can serve as a catalyst for change. Her restaurant is more than a restaurant, and this is what she wants Ella to be too.

“The most important thing though is for people to reconnect with nature there. We have a cow there so you can see it being milked.  The cheese that we make here at Manu, we make it with the milk from Andara, that’s the cow’s name. We have goats there, we have bees, we have chickens. So, I really want it to be like Fäviken. You arrive there, you can see the gardens, you can walk through the gardens, you can have some wine, you can see the fruit… I want to do something like this.

“So, we started with the garden. The garden is being built. We have a lot of stagiaires here, so I want them to come for one month and work hard in the garden and then come to the kitchen. It’s not a small garden, it’s huge: four thousand meters. It’s more like a farm really.”

Buffara is leveraging her position as the most notable chef in the region to change the food system. Curitiba is an ecologically advanced city, being named Most Intelligent City in the World at the World Smart City Awards in 2023.

Wherever you go in Curitiba, you’ll see beehives fixed to the walls, it’s part of an initiative to increase the population of the region’s native stingless bees around the city to pollinate a network of 180 urban farms. Buffara is working with a network of like-minded individuals to turn the city into a place that produces food. Her foundation also runs a network of urban public kitchens, where the city’s marginalized people can avail themselves of free food. The projects interconnect in a way like a hive of bees, each performing tasks that enhance the greater whole.

“There was a point in my life in 2019 when I realized that the restaurant has so much power so I asked, ‘why do I have to keep my knowledge to myself?’ I realized that everything that I had received from society, I had to give back in some way, so the foundation was started then,” she says.

Education is a key aspect to all the work that Buffara does, like working in Curitiba’s schools where each has its own vegetable garden and students spend time learning to grow food and studying where their food comes from. It’s an initiative that will change the future of food and food production in Brazil.

And at Manu, the opportunity to educate and inform isn’t missed either. This year, the theme of immigration teaches guests about the traditions that have created modern Brazilian cuisine. For this reason, red meat is missing from the menu.

“This year we are not serving red meat at Manu, because when I started researching the theme of immigration and learning all about that, the Portuguese, when they arrived, it was all about the sea and the fish, the same for the Germans,” she says. “Then the milk— they didn’t have animals, so they learned from the natives, how to make milk from cashew nuts.

“It’s important to teach people about Brazil, and to make them realize that they can have this amazing meal without meat. They eat the meal, sometimes they don’t even realize there was no meat. So, you feel good. Manu is a tool for education, I try to use the restaurant to send a message.

“I have seen how a restaurant this small can transform a whole city. It’s so important to see how the work that we do at Manu is to the government, not just me, but all the guys and girls who work with me. We can see the impact that we have had on Curitiba as a food destination, on all the other chefs here.

“All the chefs, we have always been friends, but we are helping each other. Manu is not just a restaurant but it is a connection. Together we are transforming food.”

You could say that in this extraordinary city’s hive mind, which is transforming its food system, Buffara is the queen bee.