The Golden Age of Brazilian Food in the Bay Area Is Here

A

cross the street from the Buena Vista Cafe’s white-coated bartenders pouring San Francisco’s most famous Irish coffee and the gobs of tourists stepping off the Powell/Hyde Cable Car turnaround, there’s an unexpected new addition to the neighborhood: a Brazilian restaurant.

But this isn’t just any Brazilian restaurant. It’s Cafe De Casa’s third location in the Bay Area, an unprecedented milestone for Brazilian food around these parts. The stylishly-designed, 5,000-square-foot former Starbucks on Fisherman’s Wharf represents a massive expansion from the cozy grab-and-go shop that Cafe de Casa had around the corner for eight years. This is now a full-blown Brazilian food emporium, offering a bevy of savory pastries like pão de queijo (aka “PDQ,” or cheese bread) and creamy, chicken-filled coxinhas, chewy-crispy stuffed tapioca crepes, lunch plates, açai bowls, fresh juices and coffee drinks galore. Now there are even packages of Cafe de Casa frozen PDQs to bake at home, along with branded malagueta pepper hot sauce and artisan ceramics.

It’s a stark contrast from when I moved to San Francisco 15 years ago and my quests to find the hearty homestyle Brazilian lunch plates that I ate every day growing up were largely fruitless. If I wanted Brazilian food, the options were limited to steakhouses (usually a big meal for special occasions) or açai bowls (a snack) from a cafe on Valencia Street that promised for years to start a lunch service but never did. Where was the everyday food and staple rice and beans?

So when I stumbled upon Cafe de Casa’s original tiny yellow house in South San Francisco in the 2010s serving legit home cooked classics, it was the only place that would effectively quell my “saudades” (deep longing) for flavors from back home in Brazil.

Now, more than a decade later, that dearth of Brazilian food options in the Bay is a thing of the past. From my home on the edge of Noe Valley and Bernal Heights, for example, there are no less than a half dozen places within ten minutes of my doorstep. I make an easy pit stop when I bike by The Brazilian Spot on Valencia near 24th Street to grab a quick PDQ or a buffet lunch on Fridays. I can walk to Noeteca on Dolores Street for hearty lunch plates during the week, and I know I can get coxinhas in a pinch at Brazilian-owned Bernal Heights Pizza down the street. There’s another sleek Cafe De Casa in the Castro, Pebbles in Glen Park has sneaky-good PDQ and Brazuca’s Brazi-Mex fusion food truck is a short jaunt away in the Dogpatch. And just last month, I discovered Vaulin’s Taproom on Bryant and 9th for a lunch plate with authentic Brazilian rice and beans, sauteed beef with caramelized onions, a fried egg and farofa.

It feels like nothing short of a golden age to be (and eat) Brazilian in San Francisco — and I’m not even counting the number of other options in Daly City or the East Bay.

But if Cafe de Casa’s expansion among this growing trend of Brazilian food businesses in a multitude of neighborhoods tells us anything, it’s that they’re very much not just feeding Brazilians. Through the years, the clientele at Cafe de Casa has become increasingly non-Brazilian, making it an important entry point to the cuisine.

“We wanted to make for Americans what Brazilians love,” says Amanda Moreira, who co-owns Cafe de Casa with her mother and sister. “Brazilian food is very agreeable to the palette. It’s flavorful, and not overly spicy.”

And while I typically introduce folks to Brazilian food via the crispy, gooey, cheesy PDQ, Moreira says the coxinha — a fried dough ball shaped like a chicken leg, filled with velvety seasoned chicken — is the perfect gateway. “I’ve never seen anyone not like a coxinha,” she says.

Cafe De Casa even sells its coxinhas and other savory pastries to smaller Brazilian cafes around the Bay, most of which tend to cater to the growing number of expats in the region, who number somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000. But non-Brazilian clientele really started to take notice of Cafe de Casa’s offerings, Moreira explains, during the surging health food movement in the mid-to-late 2010s. Words like “gluten-free” and “antioxidant” were definitely en vogue in the Bay Area, and Cafe de Casa — with its gluten-free PDQs, tapioca crepes and proprietary açai blend — was well-positioned to be discovered by new customers.

“Açai was already having its moment in the health craze, but we were the first ones doing tapioca crepes in the area,” Moreria says. “Like the pão de queijo and tapioca crepes that are naturally gluten-free — it wasn’t engineered to be that way. And there’s no sugar or milk in the tapiocas either, and people are after that, especially in these parts of California. When people with food allergies come searching for gluten-free and dairy-free, we show them an entire page of options and they’re blown away.”

A Growing Community and Culture

Moreira moved to San Francisco in 2009 from the state of Goias, where a great majority of Brazilians in the Bay Area are from. Back then, most Brazilians out here were working blue-collared jobs like delivering pizzas or cleaning houses. These days, pizza delivery has been replaced by driving for Uber or DoorDash as a predominant job for Brazilians just arriving. Brazilians come to the Bay to stay as long as possible and make as much money to either take back home or, in cases like Moreira’s, to build a life here.

Moreira’s mother, Lucimar Canedo, was an early innovator when it came to Brazilian food in the Bay. After arriving in 2004, she’d sell her savory pastries out of a pizzeria she worked at and eventually settled into building the Cafe de Casa business in earnest with her daughters in 2011. But while Canedo and Moreira’s paths have led to the growth of their own business, the culture and communities that have grown around them along the way comprise an even bigger shift in the overall Brazilian food scene.

“The population is getting bigger out here for sure,” says Vaulin Silva of Vaulin’s Taproom in SoMa. Silva owned the Inner Richmond’s Brazil-centric Sunstream Cafe for 15 years before selling it in 2020, so he knows a thing or two about Brazilians walking through his door. It’s one of the reasons he leveled up to a full-service food and beer operation in Vaulin’s.

Vaulin’s offers an extensive menu of Brazilian classics — including discounted lunch plates for ride-share and delivery drivers — as well as shareable bar food typical of Brazil’s gastropub culture to go along with a slew of beers on tap. Fostering community is on his mind, and now on weekends, Vaulin’s has live Brazilian music on the restaurant’s modest stage. “Brazilians kept coming [to the Bay], and they asked for more offerings like we have in Brazil,” he sums up, adding that his goal is to eventually attract more non-Brazilians too.

Red Light/Green Light

Before places like Cafe de Casa, El Cerrito’s Brazil Bistro and Oakland’s Paulista Kitchen & Taproom came along serving everyday Brazilian staples, Brazilian barbecue (churrasco) was the first thing that came to mind when non-Brazilians in the Bay Area thought about Brazilian food. Espetus has been slicing meats off of large skewers tableside on Market Street since 2003 and opened an even more popular San Mateo location in 2008. International chain Fogo de Chão came to SOMA in 2016.

Celso Mattos is a veteran of churrascarias. He moved from Brazil’s barbecue mecca in Southern Brazil to Texas, where he started working at Fogo de Chão. When he came to the Bay Area, he served as the manager of Napa’s Galpão Gaucho, one of the barbecue chain’s seven restaurants across the country, mainly in California. He set out on his own in 2022 to open the modest Show de Carnes Express in Vacaville, before opening up a full-blown 200-seat Show de Carnes steakhouse in Sausalito in early 2023. He hasn’t looked back.

On a recent Tuesday night, Show de Carnes is humming. The smells of traditional Southern Brazilian–style grilled meats greet you as soon as you walk into the elegant dining room. Families, corporate dinners and birthday parties are filling the long group-friendly tables along one half of the room while two- and four-tops sip caipirinhas and take trips to the loaded salad bar on the other. Meat carvers make their hypnotic shuffle from table to table looking for the green-colored side of an indicator that you’re ready to be served, and slice meats like picanha, pork ribs and chicken hearts right onto your plate (the red side tells them you’re full or need a break.) And while this is an authentically Brazilian experience, most of the clientele is not.

“My mom always said that all I need is for someone to walk through my door,” Moreira says back at Cafe de Casa. “Once they’re in, I’ll get to work, and once they’re done eating, I know they’re going to come back.”