A Rio restaurant feeds the homeless with Olympic leftovers

Consider what it takes to keep all those Olympian machines nourished and hydrated for one meal at the Rio Games: 250 tons of raw ingredients to fill the bellies of 18,000 athletes, coaches and officials in the Olympic Village. Now multiply that figure by three — for breakfast, lunch and dinner — and again for each day of the games.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Italian chef Massimo Bottura also did the maths and was inspired, not by the tantalising dimensions of herculean consumption but by the prospect of colossal waste.

“I thought, this is an opportunity to do something that can make a difference,” says Bottura, 53, a fast-talking blur of a man whose restaurant in Modena, Osteria Francescana, recently earned the top award from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

On Thursday night, that something looks like this: in a fraying section of downtown Rio, a pack of the world’s most venerated chefs were rushing around a slapdash kitchen amid a crush of volunteers as they improvised a dinner for 70 homeless people.

All of the ingredients, most of which might have otherwise been thrown away, have been donated, as has the labour of the chefs and orange-aproned servers, some of whom have traveled to Rio from California, Germany and Japan.

The creators of this place, Refettorio Gastromotiva — refettorio means dining hall in Italian — hope it will change the way Brazilians, and the world, think about hunger, food waste and the nourishing of human dignity.

“This is not just a charity; it’s not just about feeding people,” says Bottura, pausing to pick up trash from the forlorn playground outside his new venture. “This is about social inclusion, teaching people about food waste and giving hope to people who have lost all hope.”

In the days since it began operating last Wednesday out of a hastily erected translucent box in the downtrodden neighborhood of Lapa, Refettorio Gastromotiva has become something of a sensation — a feel-good counterpoint to the commercialization of the games, and to the gluttony that unfolds each night in the pop-up pavilions that many countries have set up throughout the city.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy and Brazilian actress and television host Regina Casé have stopped by, and culinary luminaries like Alain Ducasse, Virgilio Martínez Véliz and Joan Roca are among the 50 chefs who have signed up for kitchen shifts.

On Thursday night, Alex Atala, who runs DOM, one of Brazil’s top-rated restaurants, and is the former host of a popular cooking show, helped prepare the evening’s menu: Italian-style couscous with sautéed beef and panzanella, a Tuscan bread-and-tomato dish that was produced with ingredients donated by the catering companies that supply the Olympic Village.

Atala says the astounding deluge of international support was born of seemingly unrelated global movements: the growing awareness of food waste, the rise of the celebrity chef and widespread frustration over the persistence of hunger in even the most developed countries.

“We are a generation of young chefs who are not competing with each other, but who want to share,” Atala says.

The project is not Bottura’s first venture into culinary philanthropy. During the World Expo in Milan last year, he turned an abandoned theater into Refettorio Ambrosiano, and the center continues to operate. His latest refettorio is a collaboration with David Hertz, a Brazilian chef who has spent the past decade training disadvantaged men and women to work as kitchen assistants and spreading the gospel of slow food, a movement that emphasises local culinary traditions and high-quality, locally sourced ingredients.

Nine months before the start of the games, and with little time to waste, Hertz persuaded the city’s mayor to provide an empty lot, and Bottura began the difficult task of raising €223,000.

Last-minute appeals yielded a bevy of commercial-grade freezers, ovens and an ice cream maker. The structure, a gleaming industrial shed outfitted with art and crisp plywood furniture, was built in 55 days. Despite the generosity, the project ran over budget and created a nearly €170,000 hole that the organisers are trying to fill with donations.

With a 10-year lease to their sliver of land, Food for Soul, Bottura’s organisation, plans to keep the venture going after the Olympics are over. To make it sustainable, Refettorio Gastromotiva will serve lunch to paying customers and use the proceeds to fund more than 100 free dinners each night for those in need.

“This is not some pop-up project,” Bottura says. On Thursday, the second night of operation, the refettorio was the site of controlled chaos. Workers struggled to churn out three successive seatings while coping with a shortage of natural gas and an inadequate electricity supply that made it impossible to use the deep fryer, ovens and freezers at the same time.

At 6 pm, the doors open and the diners shuffle in, eyes wide with anticipation. The chef explains each course, which emerges from the open kitchen on simple white china. Cheers and applause fill the room.

One diner, Rene da Conceição, says the food is the best he has had in his 40 years, the past nine of which he has spent living with his wife on the streets of Rio. “Oh my God, he takes banana peels and makes incredible ice cream,” he gushes afterward. “And you know, we ate food from Italy!”

A thin, bedraggled man with a wide, infectious smile, Conceição explains that his meals are usually scavenged from garbage bins and that he went to bed hungry many nights. Since the Olympics began, he says, police have barred him from Copacabana, a neighborhood that provides a cornucopia of discarded food and items like cardboard that can be sold to recyclers.

More than filling his stomach, Refettorio Gastromotiva, he says, has provided much-needed dollops of kindness and respect. “These guys, they shake your hand and they treat you like you’re a boss,” he says. “I thought I was dreaming and told my wife to pinch me. But it wasn’t a dream.”

New York Times Service