“Food talks with me,” Natalia Pereira says. “We have our intimacies, ingredients and I.”⁠ ⁠ She didn’t always have a table to eat at while growing up in Minas Gerais, Brazil. “I experienced the taste of hunger many times, me and my brothers,” she says. “It’s an unforgettable taste.” Pereira is an orphan; she remembers her early childhood with her adoptive mother, Francisca, with intense fondness: sucking sugar canes, climbing avocado and mango trees, heating water by the wood stove for her baths, smelling the scent of cake in her mother’s hair. But all that was taken away from her when she was seven. She describes being “kidnapped” by her “official parents,” whom she lived with for two years before shuttling between foster homes. “That’s why I like to welcome people when they arrive at my restaurant. I like it when they eat, when they drink — eat up, girl, drink your juice!” Pereira laughs.⁠ ⁠ Sixteen years ago, she opened the restaurant Woodspoon in Downtown L.A., a space that has become her way of representing Brazil, of offering up a memory of her childhood through typically Mineiro dishes, like tropeiro beans and pork loin, or chicken and okra. Inside, the tables are square and wooden and graced with flower bouquets that Pereira sculpted from recycled napkins. There are also menus with pictures of vegetables, spoons and people in festive dresses that she drew by hand.⁠ ⁠ 📸: @jennellefong