It’s March end and look what the cat called Veuve Clicquot dragged in. This year’s World’s Best Female Chef awards! And the award goes to… Helena Rizzo from Brazil’s sultry São Paulo. Or it will when the ceremony is held on 28th April 2014 at London’s Guildhall. Formerly crowned Best Female Chef 2013 at the inaugural Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants, Rizzo has clearly gone global and how! But really, how? From “her delicate, openly feminine style”! Wow.
If we go by the description in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, we’d have to attribute her award to the success of her São Paulo restaurant, “diners here [Mani] loosen their metaphorical ties and tuck into sticky skewers of octopus with confit potatoes and sweet paprika; heady cachaça-steamed shrimp; and peach palm and pumpkin tortelli.” The World’s 50 Best Restaurants List also calls Rizzo “a model example of cooking with innovation yet soul”. Uh, yeah, the soul of a former model! Talk about beauty puns.
But their (obviously) unintended puns aside, we quote World’s 50 Best Restaurants list so much because it is curated by the same parent organization naming The Best Female Chef designation for the awards. And also because it explains a more about former model and trained architect through her bio- “After a brief stint running the kitchen of the city’s Na Mata Café, the young Rizzo embarked on a culinary grand tour around Italy and Spain that culminated at seminal Girona restaurant El Celler de Can Roca. It was here that she met her future husband, the Spaniard Daniel Redondo.” And thus was born Mani or “one of the very best restaurants in Latin America.”
[Via – Capitalfm and The-Braiser]