Mac Margolis, Columnist

Brazil's Bureaucracy Chops a Top Chef

Even a Michelin star won't save you from byzantine regulations.

September 22, 2017 at 4:23 PM UTC

Mac Margolis is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

You want some red tape with that?
Photographer: Victor Moriyama/Bloomberg

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At the stove, Roberta Sudbrack is a rock star. The self-taught chef who parlayed a hot-dog cart into top apron at the presidential palace was named Latin America's best female chef in 2015. Before Brazil's economy curdled and forced her to close her eponymous Rio de Janeiro restaurant in January, Sudbrack had captured a Michelin star.

So when a team of 15 inspectors raided her food truck at the massive Rock in Rio concert last weekend, the problem wasn't anything coming out of Sudbrack's kitchen. Rather, it was a manifestation of something more familiar: Brazil's heartburn-inducing bureaucracy.