Brazilian food and drink basics

The per-kilo place, and how not to look lost

Look for a sign saying por quilo, comida a quilo or self service. This is where most of Brazil eats lunch on a weekday, the food is often very good, and the first one you walk into is genuinely confusing. Here is the sequence:

1. Someone hands you a card at the door, a comanda. Keep track of it. Losing it is the expensive mistake.
2. Take a plate and serve yourself from the buffet. One trip, not several.
3. Carry the plate to the scale at the end of the line. An attendant weighs it and writes the number on your card. The weight of the plate itself is subtracted, so you are not paying for the china.
4. Sit down. Drinks are ordered from a server and added to the same card.
5. Pay at the cashier on your way out.

The practical consequence of paying by weight: rice, beans and anything sitting in sauce cost you exactly what the grilled fish costs. Load the plate with the dense, good things and skip the filler.

Many of these places have a grill station where someone carves meat to order. Whether that gets weighed with your plate or billed separately varies, so watch what the person ahead of you does.

A rodízio at a churrascaria is a different animal entirely: one fixed price, waiters circulating with skewers, and a coaster on your table. Green side up means keep bringing meat. Red side up means stop. Flipping it to red is not rude, it is the whole system, and it is the only way to get a break.

When people eat

Breakfast is light: coffee, bread and butter, fruit, cheese, ham, pão de queijo.

Lunch is the main meal, roughly noon to 2. The everyday version is a prato feito or executivo: rice, beans, a protein, salad, and fries or farofa, one price, on the table in five minutes.

Around 5 there is a coffee-and-something-baked window.

Dinner is late. Kitchens open around 7. A restaurant at 6:30 is empty and the same restaurant at 9 is full and loud. If you keep American dinner hours you will eat well and eat alone for two weeks.

What to order, by region

Brazil is the size of the continental US and the food changes as much as it would between Maine and New Mexico.

Bahia and the northeast coast. Moqueca baiana, a fish stew in dendê palm oil and coconut milk. Acarajé, a black-eyed pea fritter fried in dendê and sold on the street by a woman in white. Dendê is heavy, so go easy on your first day. On the beach, grilled queijo coalho on a stick and fresh tapioca.

Espírito Santo. Moqueca capixaba, the same dish without dendê, cooked in a black clay pot. Worth trying both if your trip crosses both.

Minas Gerais. Pão de queijo where it comes from, feijão tropeiro, chicken with okra, Canastra cheese, and the country’s best artisanal cachaça.

Rio. Feijoada, traditionally eaten on Saturday and heavy enough that it ends the day. Boteco food: salt cod fritters, pastel, very cold beer. Água de coco on the beach, drunk from the coconut.

São Paulo. The best restaurant city in the country, not close. Also Japanese, Italian and Lebanese food that is genuinely local rather than imported, because the communities that brought it have been there a century.

Santa Catarina and the south. Oysters and shrimp around Florianópolis, and sequência de camarão, shrimp served several ways in a row. In Rio Grande do Sul it is churrasco, and it is taken seriously.

Pará and the Amazon. The most different food in Brazil. Tacacá, a hot soup with jambu leaf that numbs your mouth. Pato no tucupi. Fruit you have never encountered: cupuaçu, bacuri, taperebá.

Coffee

Order um café and you get a small strong cup, not a mug. The cafezinho is usually already sweetened, and it is drunk standing at a counter in about ten seconds. If you do not want sugar, say sem açúcar when you order, because after is too late.

At breakfast it is filter coffee with hot milk, café com leite. Specialty coffee shops that look exactly like the ones at home exist in São Paulo, Rio, Curitiba and Floripa if that is what you want.

Coffee is offered constantly, in shops, offices and homes. Take it. Declining it is one of those small refusals that reads colder than you intend.

Caipirinhas, cachaça, and how beer works

Cachaça is distilled from fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, where rum is usually made from molasses. They are not the same spirit and they do not taste alike.

A caipirinha is cachaça, lime, sugar and ice, muddled together. Made with vodka it becomes a caipiroska, and you will find versions with passion fruit, cashew fruit and everything else. They are sweeter and stronger than they taste. Ask for pouco açúcar and you will enjoy the second one more.

Good aged cachaça from Minas is sipped neat and is worth a stop if you like whiskey.

Beer has a custom attached. It is served extremely cold, and a table shares a large bottle in an insulated sleeve, poured into small glasses that everyone at the table keeps topping up for each other. Ordering your own individual pint and guarding it is not how this works. Chopp is draft, poured with a thick head on purpose, and the head is not the bartender cheating you.

Before you fly home

An acarajé in Salvador. Feijoada on a Saturday. A pastel and a glass of cold sugarcane juice at a Saturday street market. Tacacá if you make it to Belém. Pão de queijo in Minas. A juice made from a fruit you cannot buy at home: cupuaçu, graviola, acerola, cajá.

And a cafezinho, standing at a counter, paid for in coins. It is thirty seconds and it is the most Brazilian thing you will do all trip.