Da Terra’s Rafael Cagali is breaking down borders
This piece is published in CityAM The Magazine, Winter edition, distributed at major Tube stations and available to pick up from The Royal Exchange
Brazil, Bethnal Green, Brighton: Rafael Cagali is cooking from his roots, writes Carys Sharkey
What little I know about Brazilian food stems from two places. Hungover lunches in Southwark at small cafes with beautifully beige arrays of ‘salgados’, or savoury snacks. For a couple of quid you can fill up on coxinha, dough stuffed with shredded meat which is then shaped into a teardrop and deep fried; or pastel, blistered semicircles of molten meat and cheese. But long before I spent my weekends burning fingers on puffed-up snacks, I ate chewy pão de queijo (cheese bread) and sat over bubbling pots of feijoada (an inky stew of pork and beans) at my friend’s house after school. We’d then down cans of guaraná soda in front of the TV.
So it’s fair to say that trying Rafael Cagali’s food came as something of a re-education – just don’t call his cooking Brazilian.
Cagali was born in São Paulo to a Brazilian-Italian family, and spent his early years in his mother and aunt’s ‘por quilo’ restaurant – a staple of Brazilian dining, where you select dishes from an almost endless buffet and then pay for the weight of the plate. Genius. After studying economics in Brazil, Cagali moved to London to learn English, but fell in love with cooking after working part-time in kitchens to fund his course. What followed was a culinary grand tour that moulded Cagali’s skills and sentiment. Stints on Lake Garda and in the Basque Country culminated with a job under Quique Dacosta at his triple-Michelin starred restaurant in Dénia, a small port city jutting into the Mediterranean.
Cagali moved back to England in 2012 and landed a role at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck in Bray, where he met a business and life partner in Charlie Lee. A period working with L’Enclume’s Simon Rogan was followed by the opportunity to go it alone. And in 2019 Cagali opened Da Terra.
Da Terra, nestled inside the heavy walls of Bethnal Green’s Baroque Town Hall, won a Michelin star within months of opening, before adding a second in 2021. It consistently ranks one of the best restaurants in the UK, and has received a fat docket of rave reviews. But the softly-spoken Cagali wears his accolades lightly. He is open and warm – he has previously said he was nicknamed ‘turtle’ when young on account of his “chubby cheeks”. As a chef, Cagali spends much of his time dodging the F-word, or fusion food. The term, which lived and died in the 90s, is an attempt to capture the multiplicity of culture and experience in a binary – for Da Terra, that was Italian-Brazilian.
When I speak to Cagali, that reluctance to tether his cooking is clear. He tells me that any description of his food should be taken “with a big pinch of salt”.
“My background is very international in a way. I was born and raised in Brazil, but Brazil is also a country with so much multicultural influence.”
And this resounds in the food at Da Terra, which lilts in and out of familiarity. A snack of cassava and octopus is like eating Scampi Fries on the Med (the Platonic ideal of snacking). Toothsome, fleshy red mullet sits in an ajo blanco, the Andalusian cold almond soup, with tomatoes providing both a burst of acidity and sweetly collapsing into over-ripeness. Then comes a quail dish that effortlessly elides a continent, from England’s grasslands to Bologna’s towers – a plump gamey skewer of the bird rolled with truffle comes before tortellini in brodo, perfect parcels in a fat-flecked bronzed broth. In fact it’s not until the moqueca – an impossibly refined take on a Brazilian fish stew and staple at Da Terra – that Brazil really enters the mind. But when it does, it’s with full-force in a fish dish quite unlike any other. Brazil bleeds into Cagali’s signature dessert too, the Romeo and Juliet, which arrives like an Elizabethan ruff of aerated goat’s cheese and guava, a distinctly Brazilian cousin to manchego and membrillo.
Eating at Da Terra, I was reminded of Jeremy Chan’s comments that the best compliment he ever received about his two-Michelin starred Ikoyi is “there are no reference points”. Like Chan, Cagali is spearheading food that refuses to adhere to expectations, that cannot be neatly categorised or mapped with crude border lines.
As Cagali tells me, “I don’t want to be the guy who is representing Brazil. I don’t wanna be the guy who is like, ‘Oh, you want to taste Brazilian, you go to Rafael’. I don’t want to be that guy”.
And the restaurant is all the better for it.
“There’s no ego, just curiosity and commitment to making the guest experience unforgettable,” Lee, Cagali’s partner and the masterful general manager at Da Terra, says. “We built a restaurant culture that honours both excellence and humanity”.
A big part of what makes Cagali’s food so special is a deft hand for fun, even at the highest echelons of fine-dining. “Playfulness doesn’t mean a lack of rigour – it’s about the freedom to delight”, Lee tells me.
And this is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Cagali’s latest venture Maré, which opened in Hove earlier this year. His first restaurant outside of London, Cagali says Maré came about “at the right time, in the right place”, and it’s a blinding addition to Brighton’s food scene.
The less formal little cousin to Da Terra, Maré’s menu sings with Cagali’s genre-defying cooking and echoes the double-Michelin starred’s greatest hits.
But Cagali and head chef Ewan Waller want to create a space that complements the “quirky, independent” spirit of Brighton and Hove. And above all, to cook food worth travelling for.
“That’s one of the ideas as well, bringing more customers down here. You want to also help the community, you want to add to the food scene. I think that’s the staple. We want longevity. We want to have the people talk about it. It’s important that the locals enjoy it too, because they’re the ones that are going to keep coming back,” Cagali tells me.
The ‘BYOT’, or build your own tacos, dish is a standout piece of cooking and theatre. The constituent parts: a tangle of braised lamb shoulder and a deeply, velvet mole are brought to the table for diners to heap into tacos made from cassava flour, which lends a faintly nutty flavour to the charred, puffed discs. That playful nod to Brazilian produce is surpassed only by the ‘surf and turf’ course. Picanha steak, a cut synonymous with churrasco, or Brazilian BBQ, is here served butter-tender under its hood of fat. Eaten alongside the lobster rice studded with gems of ox tongue, it’s the kind of forkful that almost beggars belief.
Towards the end of our conversation, Cagali grapples for a while with what Brazilian food actually is. He points to the country’s vast size, its relative youth as a state, the influence of other cultures, from West Africa to Japan, and the imperative of ingredients. All of this leads him to conclude that Brazilian cooking boils down to “adapting to where you are, and then adding to the food scene”.
And it strikes me then, leaving Hove on a slate-grey day where the sky becomes indistinguishable from the expanse of the English Channel, that here – thousands of miles away from the kaleidoscopic tropics of Brazil or thick hustle and bustle of São Paulo, that Cagali is the epitome of a Brazilian cook. Just don’t tell him I said so.