For every pastel carried to a table at That’s Bananas, Ottawa’s newest Brazilian café, another may perish in the fryer. The dough is rolled paper-thin and flash-fried so the shell shatters at first bite, almost like a delicate toaster pastry. Fillings are soft and rich by contrast, packed with a mash of creamy shredded chicken or warm banana folded into dulce de leche sauce, among other savoury and sweet options.
A Taste of Home
“It’s something we remember from home,” says co-owner Patrícia Silva Mancilha Neves Ferreira, who fondly describes ending nights out in her home country with a pastel in the market at six in the morning, washed down with fresh sugar-cane juice. The pastry is part of growing up in Brazil, she says, well worth the extra effort to remake any that crack before being served, which can happen a lot.
Pasteis are an immigrant’s invention, adapted by Chinese arrivals in São Paulo in the mid-twentieth century who reworked their spring rolls with Brazilian ingredients. A food born of one community remaking home in a new country is in the hands of two sisters doing the same in Ottawa.
The Sisters Behind That's Bananas
Patrícia and Beatriz, the duo behind That’s Bananas, grew up in Itu, a small city in the state of São Paulo. Patrícia came to Canada in 2019 as a student and stayed after meeting her husband. Beatriz followed in 2021, trained as a pastry cook, and spent her first years in the country selling Brazilian sweets from rented kitchens and farmers-market stalls before a storefront on Baseline Road came up for lease.
Between them, the menu bridges two worlds of Brazilian comfort food: fried snacks sold at bars or markets and decadent cakes a grandmother might bake on Sunday.
Menu Highlights
First-timers walk in expecting the heat of Mexican cooking, says Patrícia, but Brazilian food is milder. Peppers and hot sauce are served on the side. Among the savoury draws are pão de queijo, the chewy cheese bread that is the café’s best-selling snack, and the coxinha, a teardrop-shaped chicken croquette whose name means “little thigh.” The shredded filling is bound in potato dough and crisped in panko.
The daily lunch board changes through the week, much of the menu drawn from their grandmothers’ recipe book. Meatloaf, lasagna and sweet rice come around as specials. The pulled pork, braised soft, is piled on a white roll under a long pull of melted cheese.
They opened the café for local expats, “the dream of every Brazilian who lives in Ottawa,” in Beatriz’s words, a community in search of a room to laugh in and to “talk very loud, which is our way to live.” Far more people have turned up in the first six months than the sisters expected. The staff grew from five to eleven to accommodate the foot traffic.
