--- title: Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala description: Brazil's top chef puts the Amazon on a plate canonical: https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/ author: Lisa Abend article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-10-21T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-31T13:49:42.168Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala og:description: Brazil's top chef puts the Amazon on a plate og:url: https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0e141480c3988a2a/698a456b929fadf19cbfab78/360_culatala_1021.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_culatala_1021.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala twitter:description: Brazil's top chef puts the Amazon on a plate twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0e141480c3988a2a/698a456b929fadf19cbfab78/360_culatala_1021.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Lisa Abend](https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/) Oct 21, 2013 4:00 AM UTC  In the rain forest outside So Paulo, Atala harvests the tuber manioc. In the rain forest outside So Paulo, Atala harvests the tuber manioc.Edu Simoes / The Guardian by [Lisa Abend](https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/) Oct 21, 2013 4:00 AM UTC On a recent summer day, the chef of the best restaurant in South America went to tour the pepper fields of a group of female farmers. No culinary idyll, the journey required a two-hour trek through dense jungle and a stop to dig up a bucket of ants for lunch. Halfway there, the roar of a jetliner penetrated the canopy. But this was no plane; it was rain so thoroughly drenching of clothes, shoes and earth that the chef’s small group gave up trying to cross over the now raging streams and simply waded through them, boots and all. This, in other words, was rain-forest rain. And for Alex Atala, 45, who at one point during the cascade spread his arms and let the water come down on him like an embrace, it was also part of a regular day’s work. It is commonplace these days for chefs to grow their own vegetables, slaughter their own pigs and forage for ramps in the name of sustainability and terroir. Atala takes those notions to the extreme. In the course of his work, he has been stung by a poisonous ant and spent the night in a monsoon with an overturned canoe his only protection. He has drunk a hallucinogen prepared from tree bark, been threatened at gunpoint by tribesmen and kidnapped twice–once by Slovenian bear hunters. If all that makes him sound more like a superhero than a fine-dining chef, his feats are not the only grounds for comparison. Like Batman/Bruce Wayne or Spider-Man/Peter Parker, Alex Atala has two identities. And he’s only recently learned how to unite them peaceably into a force for good. The better-known Atala spends most evenings tweezing ingredients onto beautifully arranged plates in a gleaming kitchen where absolute silence rules. That Atala is a celebrity in his native Brazil, unable to walk through an airport or market without an eager fan asking for a photograph, and was given the place of honor next to Princess Caroline of Monaco at a dinner to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Monte Carlo’s elite restaurant Le Louis XV last November. A brief stint on television and his undeniable good looks have surely contributed to his fame, but mostly his outsize reputation comes from cooking. Not only has Atala taken his elegant little São Paulo restaurant D.O.M. to the upper echelons of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (it’s currently No. 6), but he has also put Brazilian food–a refined, creative version of it–on the culinary map. Yet beneath the pressed white chef’s jacket, there is another Atala. That one channeled childhood mischief into punk rebellion and then, years later, swapped urban jungle for the real thing. With a new English-language cookbook by Atala just out and a book tour that will take him through the U.S. and U.K., the rest of the world is about to learn about the power of the action-figure chef. When he was a toddler, Atala’s first word was land, a clue to what would be a lifelong fascination with nature. “He would go out in the backyard and play with ants,” his mother Otavia Mack da Silva recalls. “He would carry them around in his hands, crying because they were biting him, but he wouldn’t let them go.” Fishing and hunting trips with his father and grandfather cemented his love of the outdoors. A teacher once instructed his class to make gifts for their parents but nixed his idea for a collection of live insects. He handed his mom a jar of bugs anyway. It wouldn’t be the last time he resisted authority. At 12 he spiked the mulled wine at a Christmas party with psychedelic mushrooms. By 15 he’d left his suburban home for the city, where he worked first in a dive shop and later as a DJ and janitor at a nightclub, squatting in an abandoned building with friends. He cut his red hair in a mohawk, got the first of what would become a pelt’s worth of tattoos covering his body from the neck down and started in with illegal substances. “Any kind of trouble a young punk rocker could get into, I got into,” he says. So much trouble that he realized he had to change or risk the self-destruction to which some of his friends had already succumbed. After a brief stint in a European culinary school, he began working in the hidebound kitchens of Belgium, France and Italy, where he felt his peers looking down upon him for his poor French, his unfamiliarity with the finer points of béchamel, his roots in a country unheralded for its cuisine. Despite the kitchens’ soaring temperatures, he kept his arms covered; he didn’t want anyone to see his tattoos. Eventually he returned to Brazil and took a job as a sous-chef in an Italian restaurant in São Paulo. It was there that he had his first inkling of how he might come to really love cooking. “I was making traditional Italian food, the same as I had made in Italy,” he recalls. “But it wasn’t as good because in Brazil you couldn’t get the same products. So I started substituting Brazilian ingredients for Italian ones. And that’s when I realized I could make these dishes my own.” By 1999 he had opened D.O.M. and was trying to do just that. But critics scoffed at early efforts like a grilled tomato with mango sauce. “People were saying it was crazy, and I was always in doubt, wondering if they were right. I was listening to my heart, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do.” Gradually, though, he grew more confident, creating dishes that were profoundly Brazilian but also modern. Josimar Melo, a restaurant critic for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, sees parallels between Atala’s cooking and one of Brazil’s most famous exports. “I call it bossa nova cuisine,” Melo says. “Because what middle-class musicians did with bossa nova–which was to take the samba of Brazil’s poor and marry it to jazz to create something new and sophisticated–Atala was the first to do with food.” For a while, Atala lived a divided life, spending working hours serving elegant recipes to his well-heeled clientele and his time off in the jungles and on the rivers of the Amazon, finding relief in hunting and fishing. Then he found a way to bring the two worlds together. Early in the 2000s, he bought 62,000 acres of Amazon land with the notion that he could grow produce for his restaurants and improve the lives of local people. “I had this idea that I would make everything better for the people who lived there,” he says. “I’d farm sustainably, and they’d be happy to work for me because I would pay more.” To demonstrate his goodwill, he had cartons of staples sent to the villagers. But when he arrived at the farm to visit, piles of trash confronted him; the locals had simply dumped the packaging that the food came in. “I was so mad,” Atala recalls. “Here I was trying to do something good for people, and they were turning around and polluting the land.” He called a meeting of residents and laid into them about littering but soon realized they had no idea what he was talking about. As he writes in his book, D.O.M.: Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients, they said, “‘For us, the packaging of a fruit is its skin, a fish’s are its scales, an ox’s is its hide, and these things can all be thrown on the ground. You should not have sent us these things wrapped in plastic.’ I grew silent as I realized that playing God is not simple at all.” So he got help, both from field anthropologists and from Amerindian leaders working to protect their people’s heritage. He helped launch ATA (the word means fire in Guarani), an institute dedicated to providing sustainable opportunities to Amazonian peoples through food. It now markets chilis grown by communities along the Rio Negro. Small jars of the dried and ground peppers are sold in gourmet shops in São Paulo and Rio, where they fetch a high price. “The Baniwa have always grown chilis,” says anthropologist Renato Martelli Soares. “But through ATA they’re getting 45 reals \[$20\] per kilo. They use the money to improve the community. Plus, they get a sense of pride. They want to be inserted into the modern world and see themselves producing a high-value product.” It doesn’t hurt that those chilis come with the endorsement of Brazil’s best chef. But Atala is determined not to be just a figurehead at ATA, which is why he spends more and more time in the Amazon. On a recent trip, stirring a pot over an open fire, he helped prepare the tuber manioc with Dona Brasi, a lithe woman in her 60s with a reputation for being the best cook in São Gabriel. She was one of Atala’s first guides to Amazon food: the tambaqui fish, so large that its ribs are served whole like a pig’s; the priprioca root with its subtle flavors of wood and patchouli; the fermented, umami-rich manioc juice tucupi, a common seasoning. In fact it was she, Atala reminds her, who first taught him to cook with ants. “Ah, but you first taught me about–what do you call it?–foam,” she responds with a laugh. “You served me a dish with that on it, and I thought it was spit.” Dona Brasi may not agree, but Atala now sees his food as powerful persuasion. By basing his dishes on Amazonian ingredients, he is teaching upscale diners in São Paulo about the bounty that lies to the north and why it’s worth protecting. At the restaurant, river fish shows up swimming with tapioca in a tucupi-scented broth. A ceviche made from indigenous flowers is lightly sweetened with native honey, intensely floral and impossibly delicate. And there are ants, of course, carefully placed atop chunks of pineapple so that they add a citric jolt to the fruit. Atala isn’t influencing only his fellow Brazilians. He burst into the consciousness of world chefs with a presentation at the first MAD symposium–a two-day conference for chefs, held in Copenhagen–in 2011\. He handed out small cubes of gelatin, each containing a single ant, and urged the audience to pop them in their mouths. A murmur went through the gathered 300, first of nervousness and then of relieved surprise. “It tastes like lemongrass, right?” he asked, before explaining that in the Amazon, ants are also considered an important seasoning. “We eat an ant and say, ‘Oh, it tastes like lemongrass.’ But you give lemongrass to the Baniwa, and they say, ‘Oh, it tastes like ants.'” Like Peter Parker, Atala still sometimes seems uncertain of his own power. At this year’s MAD, he spoke about the death that lies behind every act of eating. To make his point, he brought a live chicken onstage and asked whether he should kill it. He expected ambivalence and in fact had a farmer waiting to take the bird home should the group spare its life. Instead the response looked and sounded disturbingly like bloodlust. He broke the bird’s neck smoothly and cooked and served it at a party that night, but remained discomfited. “I wanted everyone to feel a stake in the bird’s death, which is why I asked the audience to vote,” he says. “But I was a bit troubled by how insistent they were.” Mostly, though, Atala is a man at peace. He still rocks out to the Ramones and Stiff Little Fingers, and his favorite photographic pose includes a raised middle finger. But these days he rolls up his sleeves in the kitchen and wears his ever expanding map of tattoos, including two of Baniwa deities, proudly. He has learned to channel his childhood energy and punk anger into his work protecting the people and ecologies of the Amazon. Dried off after the jungle downpour and seated in a hammock overlooking the Rio Negro with a beer in his hand, he reflects on the day spent with the Baniwa women. “They’re proof that food is the bridge between nature and culture,” he says. “It took me a while to realize that, but I’ve been superhappy ever since I did. It gave me the power to unite my two worlds.” Spoken like a true superhero. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/"},"headline":"Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala","datePublished":"2013-10-21T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-31T13:49:42.168Z","description":"Brazil's top chef puts the Amazon on a plate","url":"https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0e141480c3988a2a/698a456b929fadf19cbfab78/360_culatala_1021.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lisa Abend","url":"https://time.com/author/lisa-abend/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0e141480c3988a2a/698a456b929fadf19cbfab78/360_culatala_1021.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"360_culatala_1021.jpg","caption":"In the rain forest outside So Paulo, Atala harvests the tuber manioc.","creditText":"Edu Simoes / The Guardian","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6644202/meet-the-jungle-cook-alex-atala/","name":"Meet the Jungle Cook Alex Atala"}}]}] ```