49 The Cabyard Kitchen

Published: June 28, 2016, 4:32 a.m.

A lot of Kitchen Sisters stories are born in taxicabs. The\xa0Hidden Kitchens series was conceived in the back of a Yellow. Davia lives in San Francisco and hates to drive. She started noticing that every time she got into a Yellow cab, the driver was from Brazil. And not\xa0just from Brazil, but from the same town in Brazil: Goi\xe2nia. Inevitably, these cab ride conversations turned to music and food.

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That\u2019s when the story of Janete emerged, a woman from their same hometown, who comes every night to an abandoned industrial street outside a cab dispatch lot and sets\xa0up a makeshift, rolling night kitchen \u2014 hot salgadinhos, bollinhos, p\xe3o de quejo. She cooks the food of home. By dawn, Janete and her blue tent are packed up and gone.

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One night around midnight, we decided to go in search of Janete\u2019s secret cabyard kitchen. A driver had given us a sketchy map and told us to park in the cab lot and walk from there.

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There, under a streetlight and a small blue tarp, four drivers were laughing, huddled over big plates of food, eating in Portuguese. Brazilian music spilled out of a parked cab. Janete, shy and smiling, presided \u2014\xa0a hidden kitchen vision.