Brazilian Chefs Put on a Feast for Bourdain | Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown Season 8 Episode 1

Ask anyone in Brazil who cooks for a living where the best food in the country comes from and you will keep hearing the same answer: Minas Gerais. It is a landlocked state roughly the size of France, all farmland and mountains and savannah, and almost nobody outside Brazil has heard of it. There are no major attractions and very few hotels. Tourists do not come. Anthony Bourdain arrives with one question — if this really is where the best chefs are made, why does nobody anywhere else know about it? The answer, it turns out, is partly shame. For generations the food of the yard — pork, offal, beans, cornmeal, bitter green jiló, the notorious spiky pequi fruit — was considered something you ate at your grandmother’s house and would never serve to a guest, because the food that counted was French or Italian. One food writer calls it a plague and a trauma left behind by the people who colonised the place. Another explains that pequi is good, and that people were ashamed to eat it. That shame runs deeper than menus. Half a million Africans were forced into this state during the gold rush that began in the late 1600s, and Brazil now has the largest African diaspora in the world. Zora Santos, once one of the first black Brazilian models, cooks the food of the enslaved women she considers the real matriarchs of this cuisine, and when Bourdain asks whether Afro-Brazilians have political representation to match their contribution, her answer is one word: nobody. What the hour actually documents is the shame coming off. Chef Leo Paixão trained in France and came home to cook pig’s snout and oxtail, because if he doesn’t, who will. A former banker turned a competition for neighbourhood botecos into the centre of the city’s social life. Bruna Martins staffs her kitchen with women, particularly black women, who have carried this cooking for centuries without credit. Two women who opened a fine dining restaurant twenty years ago were told it was a hobby and to go ahead and play; they are still open. In the jungle an hour outside town, a mining billionaire has built a contemporary art museum the size of a botanical garden for no reason he can explain beyond wanting to. And at four in the morning the cooks, the taxi drivers and everyone else end up over a bowl of mocotó. As one local puts it: we are quiet people, we don’t climb the mountain and shout. You have to discover us. But we have the best. Subscribe here to discover all of Anthony Bourdain's adventures and watch full episodes:    / @anthonybourdainpartsunknown   Travel the globe with the legendary chef, author, and storyteller Anthony Bourdain as he uncovers the soul of a destination through its food, culture, and politics. Far more than just a cooking show, Parts Unknown dives deep into the corners of the world rarely seen on TV—eating with locals, exploring diverse culinary rituals, and asking the hard questions. #AnthonyBourdain #PartsUnknown #TravelDocumentary #culture #cuisine