“A few weeks ago, an older gentleman, English guy maybe 70 years, and his son came in,” says Christian Estevam, who with his wife Marile, presides over a little corner of Sao Paulo in the Salford shopping precinct. “And he is asking a lot of questions about our pastels, about the ingredients. And they’re saying ‘I don’t know if I’ll like it’.” Pastels are small fried pastry parcels, often filled with cheese, or cheese and ham, and in the case of Christian and Marielles’, also a ‘pizza’ filling, with tomato and cheese and oregano. Really, what’s not to like? But nevertheless.
“I just said ‘try one of the pastries, you might like it’. So he tries a pastel, and his son tries one of the coxinhas (a teardrop shaped deep fried croquette filled with chicken and encased in silky pureed cassava, a root somewhere between a potato and a yam).
After eating two of them, his son has another coxinha and another pastel, then they have a dessert too. He says to me ‘I’ve never tasted anything like this before’. He was amazed with the flavours. But people come in, and at first they were curious, but now they come in and they are buying. They now accept us.”
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A Brazilian friend of theirs in Salford, one of the 5000 or so Brazilian and Portuguese people who live in Greater Manchester, makes all the pastels, and the coxinhas and risoles (like small deep fried pasties coated in breadcrumbs) for the shop. I had a coxinha for breakfast last week, with a cup of dark Brazilian tea, which is a flavour I can’t quite place, but similar to a black tea. I now want this for breakfast every morning, drenched in the spicy hot pepper sauces that are on each table.
Christian and Marile opened the functionally named butcher’s shop, café and grocery The Meat House three months ago, opposite the Aldi, but clearly it’s already converting the locals. It was always Christian’s dream to open a butcher, and also to sell in it some of the things he and other Brazilian and Portuguese folk miss from home. So, the shelves are loaded with exotic jars and bottles from South America and Portugal, like pulped caju, a tropical fruit vaguely related to the cashew nut, and maracujas, a relative of the passion fruit. There are cans of Guaraná Antarctica, the soft drink flavoured with Guarana that is drunk all over Brazil and Latin America.
Marile, who is critical of her own English speaking, but is excellent at it, says that the shop is like having a corner of Brazil right here. “I also get to speak a little more of my language here with the Brazilian and Portuguese customers,” she says. “But I can also improve my English a little too. I think the English customers really like it.”
The couple met 20 years ago in Sao Paulo, and married in 2006 in the city. The first time Christian moved to the UK was in 1999, studying English first and then IT at Salford University, before moving back to Sao Paulo. He then came back to Manchester again in 2016, working for DHL for a while, but still dreamed of opening a food business.
And, to be honest, he didn’t really love IT anyway. His grandparents, who were of Italian origin, were in the coffee business, a business that was 100 years old, with a farm growing beans in Parana, the state which neighbours Sao Paulo. When his father died in the late 90s, the coffee business was wound up, but the desire to work with food was always in there, somewhere. “I knew I loved to work with food. It is my passion. When I studied here, I always worked in restaurants and bars,” he says.
Christian worked all over town, in Dimitri’s on Deansgate, Milan, an Italian restaurant in Worsley and then behind the bar at places like the Cocoa Rooms, Prohibition and Sugar Lounge. The couple made huge sacrifices, even sending their son back to Brazil to be looked after by parents, while they saved and saved and went without.
But in the end, they managed to save a colossal £100,000 themselves to open the business. “It was a lot of work, no holidays, my wife will tell you. It was a dream, I can’t tell you if it’s the right dream or not,” he laughs. “But it’s a dream that has now become real.”
Already they’re making slight changes to make sure the business works. They’ve noticed that the seating area is popular with the local Portuguese customers, so they’re moving some of the shelves to put more seating in, and also plan to have seating outside on the pavement too.
And they’re also expanding the menu, so not only will you be able to buy meat from the counter, you’ll be able to choose a cut, and have it cooked in the kitchen upstairs and eat it there too, with a heap of french fries. For the carnivore, that’s kind of a dream situation.
But then, this is something of a playground for the meat enthusiast. As well as rotating rotisserie chickens cooked each day, Christian makes 16 different types of sausage, one being a metre and a half long and coiled into a round. Another he makes with beef rib and cassava, and one with chicken and pequi, a South American fruit which, due to its flavour landing between fruit and cheese, can rather divide opinion.
These are things you simply will not find anywhere else, certainly not in Manchester. And highly unlikely in Salford shopping precinct either. He also makes nine different types of burgers, using everything from beef rump to pork belly.
He sells the famed picanha steak (‘pee-kahn-yah’, if you’re off to order one) too, the cap of the rump which is much used in Latin America, but much less used here. It has a thick layer of fat and is marbled through. As an underused muscle on the beast, it remains spectacularly tender, while the fat cap bastes the steak while cooking. It’s something of a connoisseur's cut.
He also sells thick slabs of beef rib, with the rib removed, not a cut I’ve seen in any butcher around these parts, perfect for low and slow cooking (seal it in foil, with a layer of salt, nothing else, says Christian, and I feel like he really knows what he’s talking about).
In his freezer section, there are dark T-bones, and pieces of thin steak that have been vacuum packed with dried lemon slices, garlic and bay leaves to season. There are the slightly ridiculous tomahawk steaks too, the rib-eye with the huge bone protruding from them, for those occasions when your dinner isn’t sufficiently weaponised.
Some of the food comes from deep in history too. Christian sells packs of pre-mixed spiced sausage, bacon and ham for the meat and black bean stew feijoada, Brazil’s national dish, which was first made by slaves who used cuts thrown away by their masters, which in the 1600s would have been the ears, the snout, the tongue or the tails of the pig.
On each and every packet is printed The Meat House, the shop’s telephone number and the message ‘God Bless You’ beneath.
But more than a shop, a butcher, a restaurant, a coffee shop and a bar (they mix a mean caipirinha too), this place is fast becoming a community hub, one that the Portuguese community in particular are using as a place to meet. It’s also a source of nostalgia for some too, and that for Christian and Marile is one of the best things about starting up The Meat House.
“Weekends are really busy,” he says. “I want to make it a home for people. People will stay for two, three hours and drink and talk and see the friends they haven’t seen for ages. When Brazilian or Portuguese people come in, you can see on their faces ‘I’ve not seen this for years!’ when they see some of the products. Like when the adults see the sweets too. People might have been here for 10 years or 15 years, so miss those old products. So when I see that, I know I’m doing the right thing.”
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