In Brazil, Finding Comfort in Cow’s Foot Soup

His father, José Oliveira de Almeida—who goes by Seu Zé—was born in Sertão, the drought-stricken and impoverished backlands of northeastern Brazil. It’s a place that includes parts of nine different states but has no exact borders, giving it an almost mythic presence in the Brazilian imagination.

Almeida, now in his 80s, arrived in São Paulo in a mass migration in the 1960s. He threw open its doors a small grocery store in 1973, selling products from his home region, including carne de sol (sun-dried meat) and rapadura (unrefined cane sugar).

The shop also had a small, homestyle stove, so in addition to the pantry sundries, Almeida decided to sell a traditional dish from the Sertão: caldo de mocotó , a hearty cow’s-heel soup. He missed eating mocotó and thought other Sertanejos in São Paulo might too, so he started trying to recreate the dish of his youth, purely from memory. “He started cooking in his own way, guided only by taste,” Oliveira tells me, as I take a spoonful of the comforting stew.

Some say the dish was how slaves working in charqueadas , factories that made dried. Salted meat in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, used up the scraps no one wanted—similar to Brazil’s national dish feijoada , which is believed to have first been made with black beans and pig parts like feet, ears, and tails. Others claim mocotó was adapted from the Portuguese method for mão de vaca com grão , a stew of cow feet, chickpeas. Vegetables that’s most commonly eaten in the Ribatejo province, though its roots date back to Portugal’s colonization of Angola.

And I mean nothing,” Oliveira explains. “He and his family were starving in the northeast.” Caldo de mocotó was the only recipe Almeida could afford to make in São Paulo. Almeida’s goal was to make a more balanced version of the mocotó he grew up with, which “was too fatty and [had] too much seasoning,” he explains. Everything was cooked in the same pot: the meat, vegetables, and spices—each component a memory of his homeland. “There were so many textures, so many layers of flavors that it was impossible to have two spoons that tasted the same,” states Oliveira. “This is how he taught me to cook.” Mocotó, located in the Vila Medeiros neighborhood of São Paulo, began trading more than 40 years ago.

By 1979, Almeida was able to open a bar nearby, which is where the Mocotó restaurant is still located today. There were just a handful of dishes on the menu at first, each cooked low and slow: mocotó; mocofava , a method created by Almeida’s brother Gercino that combines mocotó with butter beans and various meats; sarapatel , a pork offal stew; and a few appetizers made from other leftovers like pork intestines and spleens.

In the mid-1980s, the shop ceased trading, but the bar became a full-blown restaurant, adding more dishes and expanding its collection of cachaça , the Brazilian spirit made from fermented sugarcane juice. As the years went on, Oliveira became more involved in the business, working his way up from helping out at the store to taking over the restaurant kitchen in 2001.

Almeida didn’t like changes to his recipes, so even as the head chef, Oliveira would only tinker with the mocotó when his father was away. He ultimately made just one change: instead of relying on cornmeal or wheat flour to give the stew body, he used grated manioc, which made for a lighter, more flavorful mocotó.

As the family method evolved under Oliveira, so did Mocotó, turning into one of the most influential restaurants in Brazil. Oliveira even earned a Michelin star at his fine-dining restaurant Esquina, which used to be next door to Mocotó and was visited by some of the biggest names in the food world, from Ferrán Adrià to Anthony Bourdain.

It’s still the spot where locals stop for a bowl of mocotó to soak up the cachaça before going home. And for Oliveira, it’s still an key reminder of where his family came from.