In 2026, Cezar Brelaz marks 51 years living in the United States — almost four decades in Los Angeles alone. He is probably the Brazilian with the longest residence in the Brazilian Community in Los Angeles that we know of, and he opens the Brazilian Pioneers in Los Angeles series telling how he left Parintins, deep in the Amazon, as a teenager, with a scholarship to learn how to fly — and never went back.

From Parintins to Memphis: the scholarship that changed everything

Cezar arrived in the United States in 1975 with a scholarship to Memphis, Tennessee. The plan was never to stay: he wanted to learn to fly a plane and go back to Parintins to help his uncle, a pastor doing missionary work with an Indigenous tribe in the region. Parintins, known today for its bumba-meu-boi folk festival, was not famous yet at the time.

In Memphis, Cezar finished high school and learned to fly — and he still keeps a historical curiosity from those days: Elvis Presley was alive, and he played soccer with a Spanish painter who was painting the singer's house, who took him to see the place from the outside.

After two years, he went back to Parintins, but had no plane to fly. He worked at a hotel, then in Manaus, and tried to start over in Brazil more than once — including a stint in South Carolina, where he studied Business Administration, and six months at a newspaper in Manaus. Only after seeing no professional future in Brazil's North did he decide to settle in the United States for good.

Dallas, trucks and the Thomas Guide

The next stop was Dallas, Texas, where Cezar had a sister. He spent four years driving moving trucks — no GPS, no internet, just the Thomas Guide, the thick map book every driver had to carry back then. He even lived with twelve people in a two-bedroom apartment to spend as little as possible, saving at least a thousand dollars a month — a lot of money at the time.

It was during this period, still in the 1970s, that he got his Social Security number as a student — a process that, he says, was much simpler than it is today, long before the immigration restrictions that came after September 11, 2001.

From studio janitor to partner at Pampas Grill

Cezar moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives, about 38 years ago. His first job in the city was building maintenance for a company tied to the film industry. Around that time he met Geraldo, a multilingual tour guide who spoke German, French and Italian, and started helping him on weekends. The partnership worked, and the two brought in Francisco — “Chiquinho,” Cezar's partner to this day — to found LA Tours, a multilingual tour company that grew fast by offering tours in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, something no competitor had.

The garage where they kept the LA Tours buses was exactly where The Grove stands today — before that, an old oil field. When September 11, 2001 froze tourism in the United States and, at the same time, construction of The Grove began, Cezar and Chiquinho had to reinvent themselves.

The answer came from inside the Farmers Market itself: first they bought Phil’s Deli and kept it running. Later, when a nearby Japanese restaurant closed, they built the first Pampas Grill at the same address where it still operates.

Original LA Tours material, the multilingual tour company founded by Cezar, Geraldo and Chiquinho in the 1990s

The birth of pay-by-weight self-service

The concept that made Pampas Grill famous came from Cezar's own tourism experience: tour buses stopped for only an hour for lunch, with no time to order and wait for food. The answer was a Brazilian rodízio in self-service format, priced by weight — something that, he says, did not exist in Brazil in that form and was adapted especially for the American public.

At first, the idea met resistance: suspicious customers asked whether the meat was horse or dog, and charging by weight drew so many complaints that health inspectors were called to check the restaurant several times — never finding anything wrong. Even the grill had to be custom-built, with special motors, because no standard equipment could handle the size Pampas Grill needed.

The result became one of the best-known Brazilian restaurants in Los Angeles — Cezar recalls that Leonardo DiCaprio once stood in line to eat there. Today Pampas Grill has two locations: at the Farmers Market (The Grove, Fairfax and 3rd) and in Culver City, near the Sony studios — the latter doubled in size during the pandemic, when Cezar expanded into the space of a neighboring Japanese restaurant. About 90% of the customers are American, of every ethnicity, especially Asian and Latino diners.

Pampas Grill today, in Culver City

“God gave everyone 24 hours a day. What you do with your time is what makes the difference in your life.” — Cezar Brelaz

The real estate lesson

Cezar is direct about what he would do differently: nothing in his career, but he regrets not buying property sooner. “Everything I did was with the intention of going back to Brazil,” he explains — and so he put off important financial decisions, like buying a house back when you could still find homes in Los Angeles for a hundred thousand dollars.

His advice for newcomers to the Brazilian Community in Los Angeles is to build wealth here, even if the plan is to go back someday. He cites a friend who bought a house for $350,000 in 2017, sold it for $950,000 during the pandemic, and today the same home is worth more than $1.2 million.

Why English was the turning point

Another factor Cezar credits for his professional success is English. In his first years in the United States, he lived with an American family and practically stopped speaking Portuguese — which sped up his learning and opened doors in every job that followed, from his promotion to supervisor at the trucking company to founding LA Tours, with customers of many nationalities.

Pioneer number 1

Cezar Brelaz officially opens the Brazilian Pioneers in Los Angeles series — and, with 51 years in the United States, he is probably the Brazilian with the longest residence in the Brazilian Community in Los Angeles that we know of. The series will bring other pioneers to tell how they built their lives in California.

Know a Brazilian who has lived in Los Angeles even longer? Tell us through Contact the newsroom, right on this page.

Who's speaking: Brasileiros em Los Angeles is the podcast of the Brazilian Community in the Los Angeles area, hosted by Jason Lanzarini, who since 2014 has run the Community's Facebook groups in California. In the Brazilian Pioneers in Los Angeles series, he talks with Brazilians who arrived before the internet and GPS about how they built their lives here. In this interview, Cezar Brelaz, in the United States since 1975, co-founder of LA Tours and Pampas Grill, at the Farmers Market and in Culver City.

This topic comes from the full episode — watch it:

Brazilian Pioneers in Los Angeles · Cezar Brelaz — ☆ Brasileiros em Los Angeles