Eating in Brazil

One of the questions you always get on return from a trip is the inevitable “So how's the food?”  Well, after a couple of weeks in Brazil, I am afraid I would have to say - I don’t know. “You ate didn’t you?” Yes, we ate and lots of things we ate were pretty good - but I have a sense that we missed more than we experienced. So how's the food? What we had was good. But we had a lot of the same stuff, over and over.

It was not because we were averse to adventure dining.  It was kind of because of the way Brazilian restaurants operate. It took us a while to figure it out. Our first problem was linguistic, of course.  80% of the menus were in Portuguese only. I found that my high school Spanish helped a lot, so I had a general clue about my choices, but there was something we could not figure out.

One of the first things we learned was the word “Choppe”. It means “draft” and was usually the first thing we took care of.  Choppe, Choppe, Caparina, Choppe. Now we had time to look at the menu. Typically Choppe was 3 or 4 Real (R$), about $1.50-1.80.  It gave us a reference to how expensive a restaurant we were in. Okay, so this place is pretty reasonable, let’s look at the dishes. This was  a puzzle. If beer is cheap (R$3) why does a chicken dish cost R$60 ($27 US)? And then: okay it’s chicken  (frango) but chicken what? And how?

That was the adventure. Oh well, we just dove in and ordered. Fortunately we thought it made sense to order something, try it, share it and go from there. It was a good policy. Why does a chicken dish cost R$60? Because it is a big plate of chicken and it comes with rice and beans and usually one or two other sides. Brazilians eat family-style when they go to restaurants, it seems.

As we got more experienced we noticed and understood what was going on at the other tables and so that is how we begin ordering. But there's a problem in that. First, you were ordering one, maybe two dishes - not four. That alone limits your ability to experiment. And then whatever you order needs to be okay with everyone. That pushes you towards the most common denominator and towards ordering again something that worked last time. Especially when the only word in the description that you understand is “frango”.

We ate a lot of grilled meat. The places we went did not seem to have a dinner menu or a lunch menu - they just had a menu. Lunch and dinner were pretty much the same thing - one just a few hours later than the other. Our usual pattern was built around the group stage game schedule. We’d wake up when we wanted and get breakfast (see next post) or not, depending on the time. The first kickoff of the day would be at 1 PM. Depending on the importance of that game, we get to a restaurant with a TV either 30 minutes before kickoff (to get a decent view of the TV) or at halftime (when tables freed up as people moved on). We would start with something to drink. In Fortaleza we discovered beer came in 600 ml bottles, twice the size of a choppe, delivered in styrofoam jackets to keep them cold and usually just R$5 or 6. That alone could hold us for 90 minutes if we wanted, but at some point we would order a dish to share. That was lunch. The next game was at 3:00 and often we skip it unless it was the big one and then be back in a restaurant at 6:00 for dinner and the night cap.

It was a lot of fun because the restaurants were always packed and the fans were always passionate - but it was not a five-star culinary experience and the grilled meat did get old after a while. There were options: lots of pizzerias, more Italian style than US and there was McDonald’s. We mostly avoided that, except for the Mokarito McFlurries. They were the perfect late night snack.   We had a few.