Manu Buffara

Best Latin America’s female chef 2022, according to 50Best Academy, number 21 in The Best Chef Awards worldwide ranking and chef/owner of restaurant number 49 in the list of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants (both in 2021), a fixed juror since 2019 of the Basque Culinary Center, and one of the stars of the last four versions of the Gelinaz chefs’ collective, Manoella Buffara Ramos, better known as Manu, has been earning her living as a cook since 2006. In January 2011 she opened Manu Restaurant, the first ever in Brazil headed up by a woman chef to serve only a tasting menu. Manu Restaurant has five tables, serves 20 people per day and could be anywhere in the world, but it is in Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, a Brazilian state with an economy based on agriculture and industry, where Brazilians and foreigners alike generally do not find much in the way of glamor. According to the Brazilian chef Alex Atala and the writer and food curator, Andrea Petrini, she put Curitiba on the world gastronomic map.

In tune with the cutting-edge trends of culinary, the Manu Restaurant works with fresh, seasonal ingredients, and 60% of the products used in the recipes are plant based. And they appear in every texture a diner could ever dream of: fermented, cooked under controlled conditions at low temperature for over a day, macerated at the last minute, raw, cured, baked. Fish and seafood are also featured on the menu that serves only one dish of red meat, which since 2019 is never beef. The meats come from small livestock farms of lamb and porco moura, a pig breed originally from southern Brazil and now making a comeback after research by the Federal University of Paraná.

Like everything else at Manu Restaurant, the pairing of drinks is done with zeal and gives great space to the national production of natural and biodynamic wines, bets on the small producer and also suggests other drinks such as sake, flower infusions and homemade fermented products.

Manu thoroughly knows each ingredient she uses in her preparations, as well as each person who supplies them, 80% of whom live within a 300 km radius from the restaurant. Many are her friends, whom she visits for lunches and long talks. And she devotes the same informed care to the flatware, the tableware and the drinks served in the house. One of her secrets is her profound attention to the little details. For example, the flowers that decorate the tables are picked daily on the streets near the restaurant. Sometimes by Manu herself. She is also proud to have part of the team she has worked with since the beginning of the open house.

From November 2022 to November 2023, Manu will run Fresh in the Garden, a year of Manu Buffara kitchen at Soneva Resort, at the Maldives Islands. Part of her Curitiba team’s will move to Maldives for a year and cook with the incredible ingredients from the island gardens as well as from Sri Lanka, India and Asia. The restaurant will have 35 seats and a menu with 30% vegan recipes; 30% vegetarian recipes and the rest based on seafood.

In 2023, Manu will open her second restaurant, Ella, in the Meatpacking District of New York, USA. The New York restaurant’s design was conceived by architect Isay Weinfeld to accommodate 60 diners and aims to show Manu Buffara’s most straightforward side, with many dishes meant to be shared, along with appetizers off the menu but known to regulars. Like everything served at the tables, they are made with fresh, natural ingredients and a Brazilian touch.

A farmer’s daughter of Italian and Lebanese ancestry, Manu Buffara spent her first 14 years in Maringá, in Paraná’s interior region. At 15, when her parents separated, she moved to Curitiba. She earned a journalism degree (2005) and took courses in hotel management and gastronomy at the Centro Europeu in Curitiba (2005 and 2006) and earned her chef’s diploma at the International School of Italian Cuisine (ICIF) in Piedmont, Italy, the birthplace of the slow food movement. She was the first Brazilian to undergo a traineeship at Noma, in Copenhagen (2008 and 2010), elected as the best restaurant in the world in the 2021, 2014, 2012, 2011 and 2011 ranking of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. She also had short stints as a trainee at the Guido restaurant, in Italy (one star in the 2005 Michelin), and at the Alinea, in Chicago (three stars in the 2009 Michelin guide). Her first job was as a chef at the Rayon Hotel, where she led a team of more than 40 people who served breakfast and meals in the hotel’s two restaurants, one of which, the Gala, is known for its refined cuisine. Manu held that position for four years and in the last two was responsible for all the restaurants of the Rede DeVille hotel chain, which had hotels in four Brazilian states (Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, São Paulo and Bahia), putting her in charge of more than 400 people.

Since its first year of operations, the Manu Restaurant has garnered national gastronomy awards. There are more than 50 of them scattered throughout the restaurant and on the shelves and walls of her office. The first, received in December of the restaurant’s first year was that of Emerging Chef, awarded by Guia 4 Rodas, the Brazilian equivalent of the Michelin Guide. Since 2017, Manu has traveled the world to cook, participate in events, receive awards and take part on international juries. To cite some examples, she commanded a pop-up restaurant in the Soneva Hotel, in the Maldives (2021); cooked with Anatoly Kazakov (2018 and 2021) at the Selfie in Moscow; with Mauro Colagrego, Rodolfo Gusman, Pia Leon and Virgilio Martinez at the Grand Coeur in Paris (2019); with Dominique Crenn at Atelier Crenn (2019); with Maksut Askar at the Neolokal in Istanbul (2019); with Ana Ros at the Ein Prosit, in Italy (2019); with Virgilio Martinez and Pia Leon at Mil Centro, Mexico (2019); at the Kjolle, Peru (also in 2019); and with Himanshu Saini, at the Trèsind in the Arab Emirates (2021). She was the only chef invited to cook with Alex Atala in São Paulo at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the restaurant D.O.M. She has given various lectures, including at The Culinary Institute of America (in 2018); at 50BestTalks (2019); at the Sustainable Thinking Symposium of the Basque Culinary Center (2019); at the 15th edition of the Congress of Cooks (CNC, 2019); at The Best Chefs Awards (2021); and at Chef-Sache Dusseldorf (2021).

Since the opening of her restaurant, in 2011, Manu Buffara has been involved in sustainability actions aimed at causes such as preserving native Brazilian bees and incentivizing young producers not to abandon the areas of fishing and agriculture in Paraná. Since 2016, she has participated in the Urban Gardens project with the city government of Curitiba. The city has a law that allows vacant lots to be transformed into community gardens and Manu is the chef most involved with those gardens and gives workshops concerning the use of vegetables in the kitchen, teaching about health and cleanliness and encouraging zero waste and sustainability. The Manu Buffara Institute has been active since 2020, responsible for various programs including the annual event known as Alimenta Curitiba which distributes food and holds educational and social inclusion events in the more needy areas of Curitiba. She is also one of the chefs involved with Mulheres do Bem, a group of women chefs who serve 400 lunches to street dwellers once a week at a restaurant of the Curitiba city government.

Married since November 2012 with lawyer and owner of the law firm Borges de Liz Logística Jurídica Especializada, Dario Borges, Manu has two daughters, Helena and Maria, eight and six years old, respectively. And a border collie named Snow. A tennis player and yoga practitioner, she is always up for a trip or adventure and makes sure to spend the first days of each year with her family and her mother Mônica and brother Eduardo at the beach, and to

savor the rustic life at the farm of her father, Eduardo Ramos, in Maringá, on stays there during the summer.