A principal source of funding for the project comes from an Indian food event called the Curry Clube. Perhaps a little explanation is in order…

I moved to Rio in 2008, having previously lived in Wembley, a predominantly Indian neighborhood of London, where I could always get a great curry. Rio doesn’t have much in the way of Indian food, and after a year the withdrawal
symptoms became too much to bear and I started learning how to cook my own curries via internet recipes. I began cooking for my housemates weekly, and then more friends started coming, then people that I didn’t know, so eventually I ended up charging. In 2013 I decided to up the prices a bit and use the profit from Curry Clube to fund Favela Brass.

We’ve done Curry Clube in various different configurations – with live jazz music, live samba music, at my house, at other peoples’ houses, weekly, and monthly. At present Curry Clube happens at the same place as the Favela Brass music lessons (my house in the Pereirão favela) and we do it on Sunday evenings once a month. We’re combining our curry with an informal live samba jam at the moment, and are trying to get the children playing at the event as much as possible.

To come to Curry Clube, you have to keep an eye on the Curry Clube facebook page for when the next event is. It’s then just a matter of getting here:

Getting to Curry Clube, Part One:

The first thing is getting yourself to the entrance to our favela (“Pereirão”) at Rua Almirante Alexandrino, 2023 (they always put the house number after the street number in Brazil). Two ways to do it:

1. Take a taxi. To help the taxi driver, Almirante Alexandrino 2023 is between (“entre”) the “hospital do quarto centenário” and the “Largo da França” in the Santa Teresa district, near to the favela “Fallet” (pronounced “fa-letch”).
2. Take a bus. Perhaps only an option for people who are living in Rio and have a bit of local knowledge. You take the 006 or 007 from Centro, Lapa or Santa Teresa and ask to get off at Fallet.

Getting to Curry Clube, Part Two:

Once at Almirante Alexandrino 2023, you walk up the ramp from the street, then when you come to the big set of gates with “Assunção Cenam” written on them at the top, you follow the path that goes past the gates and up to the right. You then continue on this path up, then down, and my house (casa 13) is on the right just after a small church “capela” on the right hand side. If all that sounds a bit complicated, you can also see the journey as a sequence of photos on facebook:

If in any doubt, once in the favela just ask any of the locals for “casa do Tom” and they’ll point you in the right direction.

Curry clube was also recently featured on eatrio.net, Tom Le Mesurier’s excellent blog all about what to do in Rio.