About two months ago, one of the lanes of Vieira Souto Avenue was closed at 10 PM on a Saturday for an unusual operation: the hoisting of a two-and-a-half-ton stove to the 21st floor of the building at number 460. At that address, the five-star Sofitel will reopen in October, and that oven was the crowning jewel of a renovation that has already been ongoing for seven years.
Manually and custom-made in the workshops of the century-old Molteni in Saint-Vallier (southern France), the equipment cost US$ 2 million — by far the most expensive restaurant stove in Brazil. The operation to bring the stove to the top of the Sofitel lasted nearly eight hours.
The one who will pilot this Ferrari of ovens is Rafa Costa e Silva, whose multi-starred Lasai will move from a small house in Botafogo to the top of the Sofitel as soon as it reopens. The stove only reached the top after nearly eight hours of work.
The particularity of the operation was that it could not be windy. When the team began lifting it, at one in the morning, it started to blow very hard. It was necessary to wait until the maximum limit, at 3 AM, to try again, and it worked.
