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“I only believe in two types of food: good food and bad food,” says chef Alberto Landgraf as we sit at the counter of his first London restaurant, Bossa. Outside it’s a warm London late afternoon. Nearby Oxford Street is bustling and inside the restaurant, it’s no quieter, with staff and contractors buzzing like bees – tasting, polishing, drilling. It’s the soft launch period and tomorrow they’re open. For the chef from two-Michelin-star Oteque in Rio, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
“It kind of had that feeling of coming back home,” says the chef who has history here, having lived, studied and worked in the city in the early 2000s and who counts the likes of British chef James Lowe of Lyle’s as a close friend. Bossa will be a “half Brazilian restaurant”, he says, with 70% local ingredients and some “British versions of some of the dishes we have at home”, designed to be shared or not – “I don’t like to share” confesses Landgraf, and no tasting menus (apart from in the private dining room).
I get to taste a few: a fat scallop with classically braised leeks, toasted buckwheat and tucupi, the Amazonian sauce extracted from yuca; roast bone marrow served with a kind of tapioca tortilla and a cashew sauce with which you’re encouraged to create ‘tacos’; a moqueca, the Brazilian stew with roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, here utilising fine local seafood, like sweet langoustine and plump mussels; and a subtly brilliant and hardly approaching sweet dessert of acai, spiced chocolate and sugar cane.
“But we don’t want to change too much, we want them [the diners] to have the Brazilian experience,” he says. It's all on the ‘good’ nay 'great' side of the Alberto Landgraf food swingometer you’ll be pleased to hear.
A lot of Brazilian restaurants in London, taking the likes of Rafael Cagali’s Da Terra out of the equation, are “not a good representation of what Brazil is right now,” according to Landgraf and he is on a mission to showcase the modern Brazil through his food. To do that he’s brought his "A-Team" with him, including Head Chef Nilson Chaves, Sommelier Laís Aoki (recently named Brazil's best by Prazeres da Mesa magazine) and Pastry Chef Nathália Gonçalves.
And Landgraf will be in town as often as possible to check-in. “London’s operating on another level right now,” he says. “It’s the best capital city in the world.”
Take a look at dishes from Bossa by Alberto Landgraf, below.
Moqueca
Scallop, braised leeks, toasted buckwheat, tucupi
Roasted bone marrow
Tapioca and cashew
Barbecue lobster, confit tomatoes and canterelles
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