“My biggest inspiration is my home. My family home.”
Tássia Magalhães is a Brazilian chef whose cooking brings together Italian tradition, Brazilian ingredients and the experiences she has gathered throughout her career. With more than 15 years in gastronomy, her journey has taken her from São Paulo to some of Europe’s most acclaimed kitchens, including Geranium, Kadeau and Amass, before bringing those influences back to Brazil.
At Nelita, her restaurant in São Paulo’s Pinheiros district, Magalhães explores Italian cuisine through a distinctly Brazilian perspective. Her dishes combine familiar techniques with local ingredients, from acerola and manjubinha to vegetables prepared in unexpected ways. The result is a cuisine that looks beyond simply reproducing tradition, using it as a starting point for something personal.
But Nelita is also a reflection of Magalhães’ values outside the plate. The restaurant’s kitchen is made up entirely of women, a conscious decision through which she hopes to create more opportunities for women in professional kitchens. For Magalhães, cooking is not only about developing a style of cuisine, but also about understanding where she comes from, learning from the places she has been and creating her own voice. At the centre of that process remains something much more personal: her family, her home and the experiences that have shaped her.
The Best Chef: Your kitchen at Nelita is made up entirely of women, which is quite a powerful statement. Why was it important for you to create this kind of team, and how does that philosophy connect with the food you serve?
Tássia Magalhães: I decided to work only with women because I think it’s important to use my name, my reputation and my work to increase the number of women in professional kitchens. I want to use my position to create more opportunities for women and to show that we can build strong and creative kitchens.
When I started my career, I thought I needed to be more like the men around me to earn their respect. I thought I had to be tougher, more aggressive and even change the way I dressed and behaved. I felt that if I showed too much of my femininity, people wouldn’t take me seriously. But with time, I understood that I didn’t need to lose who I was to become a chef. When I started working on the Nelita project, I realised that things could be different. I could be feminine, I could be sensitive, I could be myself and still lead a strong kitchen.
That’s why having an all-female kitchen became so important to me. It wasn’t simply about putting women together in one kitchen. It was about creating the kind of environment I would have wanted to find when I was starting my career – a place where women can develop technically, have opportunities and eventually become leaders themselves.
Today, I see a lot of strength in the way women work together. There is a lot of trust, listening and collaboration. I think our kitchen can be delicate and powerful at the same time. Those things don’t have to be opposites.
For me, Nelita is also about showing who we are and where we come from. I want to create food that represents me, my experiences and the things I believe in. One of our classics is pasta with goat cheese, lemon sauce and honey. I love this dish because it has a lot of acidity together with sweetness. I really love this combination, and I think it has become a kind of signature in my dishes.
The people who work here, the ingredients we use and the food we put on the plate are all part of what Nelita is. I’ve also received One Knife from The Best Chef Awards in 2024 and 2025, and I hope this year too!
The Best Chef: You also have a wine bar connected to Nelita. What was the idea behind creating it, and what does it mean to you to combine Brazilian ingredients with a strong wine programme?
Tássia Magalhães: The wine bar was inspired by many different concepts from around the world. But the main idea came from Nelita, which is just across the street. We wanted to create a relationship between the two places. Here in Brazil, we didn’t really have a strong culture of combining good food with good wine. The wine bar was often sacrificing the food, or the wine was the main focus instead of doing both together. We wanted to create a great environment where people could enjoy a wine list with much more than 300 labels, together with restaurant food. We wanted to create a gastronomy that is perfect for wine.
At the same time, it’s important for us to work with our own products. I think that’s the key to the future in the kitchen. We have our Brazilian anchovy, manjubinha, for example. We want to work with the products that belong to our country and show what we can do with them. For me, Brazilian cuisine has so many possibilities. We have incredible fruits, vegetables, fish and other ingredients, and I think it’s important to understand them and give them a place in contemporary cooking.
The Best Chef: Your cooking brings together influences from Copenhagen, Italy and Brazil. Where do you find your inspiration today?
Tássia Magalhães: I don’t know. I think that with the years, I’m going to understand myself better and create my own inspiration.
When I lived in Copenhagen, I learned a lot. I learned how to work with vegetables and how to look at ingredients in different ways. That experience was very important for me. My first restaurant here in Brazil was an Italian restaurant because Italian cuisine is my passion. And there was a lot of zucchini, because in Italy everybody loves zucchini!
But for me, my biggest inspiration is my home. My family home. My family.
My family is Portuguese, but my grandparents lived in São Paulo, a city deeply influenced by Italian immigration. My first internship was in an Italian restaurant, and it was love at first sight. I realised that even much of the food I grew up eating in the countryside was influenced by Italian immigration.
I think that as you grow as a chef, you collect different experiences from the places where you’ve lived, the kitchens where you’ve worked and the food you’ve cooked. But at some point, you need to understand yourself and create your own way of cooking. That’s what I’m trying to do now. My inspiration comes from everything I’ve experienced and everything I’ve learned, but also from my family and my home. I think that’s where I really understand who I am. And you can see that even in a simple ingredient like zucchini. We take something I have loved since my Italian cooking days and work with it in our own way. Here we have zucchini with burnet, smoked zucchini cream, pickled zucchini and black garlic sauce.
So maybe my inspiration is not one particular place or one particular person. It’s everything I’ve lived, everything I’ve learned and, most importantly, my family.
Chef Instagram:@tassia_magalhaes
Restaurant Instagram: @nelita.restaurant
Restaurant Address: Rua Ferreira De Araújo, 330, São Paulo, 05428-000, Brazil
