Food and drink in Brazil

That juice looks delicious and your photos bring back memories of my trip there 18 years ago. Mostly I remember drinking caipirinhas and drinking coconut milk on the beach. I don't remember the food so much but the coffee was wonderful. We were with y niece who speaks Portuguese and her then-husband who is Brazilian.

Kevin liked the caipirinhas, and I especially liked the coconut water. The pineapple juice I had there was also the best I've had. Here are some caipirinas stands on the beach, for Pam:

Today we went to BestBuy because I had to buy a replacement computer, as my current one is trying to die, and so I am going to have to set up a new one. We decided to have lunch in Culver City while there and were going to go to a Korean sushi place right next to BB, but no restaurants were open except for the Pampas Grill, a Brazilian cafeteria, and so we went there and had Brazilian food again, even though Kevin protested. That's the third time in less than a week that we have gone to Brazilian Churrascarias. The one in Culver City was very similar to the one we went to in Copacabana but cost almost twice as much. The food was slightly better at the Culver City one, and I had Thai coconut water.

Welcome home, Lars! I'll be looking forward to those pictures, I've never been to Brazil, but had a Brazillian foreign exchange student staying with us back when Amanda was in high school, she was from Sao Paulo.

That juice is very, very pink and the view from SugarLoaf is amazing. I'm glad you had a good time and you and Kevin both came home safely. Sorry about the computer, though, it's always just a pain to change everything over...

Annie

I'm still a bit jet-lagged and am not back on a regular meal schedule, but here are some photos of the food fair in Ipanema:

Chandon is a Brazilian sparkling wine, similar to Champagne. DB (Kevin) bought a glass and brought home the plastic wine glass as a souvenir. I tasted it, and it is pretty good, but I think it would taste better in glass than in plastic! I only bought fruit and some little coconut cakes at the fair - we had just had lunch plus dessert just before. Here's the dessert we shared at a very nice restaurant in Ipanema:

Did you learn any Portuguese from the exchange student who visited you? I find it somewhat difficult to learn because the pronunciation is (to me) irregular, and I have to listen to someone speak it to pick it up at all. The easiest word to pick up was obrigado, and I was never sure how to say bom dia. I usually pronounced the "D" like a "J", but not everyone did. The first sentence I learned was "Eu não falo português."

Thanks for the pictures, Lars

Thank you for sharing your pictures. I hope you had a great time, even though you didn't enjoy the food all the time. The restaurant on Sugarloaf looks amazing, and the food fair looks like fun. The caipirinas stands on the beach are great -- and I'm certain you grabbed your square cut and jumped right in and played v-ball with the rest. ;)

I cannot access any more photos until I set up my new computer, and I do have more food stories to share, but in the meantime, here is someone else's video of Brazilian Volley Futball in Ipanema:

I'm pretty bad at regular beach volleyball, and I would never be able to play something like this. Kevin took videos also, but there was something wrong with his video camera, and so all of those are lost. I have since learned how to make videos with my still camera, but it looks like we might need to get a new video camera as well.

I'm not much of a sports fan, but I did enjoy watching these games on the beach - I was very impressed with the skills I saw.

Wow, it looks like a terrific trip! The photos here and on FB look great and the views were spectacular!

We found the food fair by accident. It was Saturday in Ipanema, and I just wanted to stay near the beach, and that's when we took photos of the beach volley futball. After that, we went to Zazá Bistrô Tropical that I wanted to go to (where we had lunch and dessert), which was just a block from Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz that I also wanted to visit. It just happened to have the festival, but they probably have them every week. After four days in Ipanema, we moved to a larger apartment in Copacabana (near Ipanema), but I wish we had divided more time for Ipanema, as I liked it better, but Copacabana was cheaper. We did have a bigger and better kitchen in the second apartment, however, but we used it mostly for storing and reheating leftovers from restaurants. There were plenty of food markets, and we visited them every day - I bought mostly fruit and juice, but my friend Dean visited the pastry shops daily, as he particularly likes Portuguese sweets, but they did not appeal to me that much. I did find a French bakery, Boulangerie Guerin, a block from the second apartment, which I liked partly because I could order in French. Reviews say that it is expensive, but I found the prices reasonable for what I got. I especially liked their pain au chocolate aux amandes and the croissants. I liked this shop better than the Portuguese style pastry shops and stocked up when I went there. I sort of felt like I should have been eating Brazilian food instead of French, but that bakery was so good. Anyway, I can get Brazilian food here in L.A. as easily as I can get French.

There were lots of health food and juice shops near the beach, and I was able to find graviola sorvetes - essentially a cherimoya sorbet on a stick - which I loved. Those and the suco de pitaya were my favorite things. We stocked up on sorvetes and stored them in the freezer in the apartment. Early in the trip I found a place that had cashew fruit juice, which is made from the fruit surrounding the cashew nut, which I had heard was very unique, but I did not particularly like it. It tasted like weak grapefruit juice and was quite tart. Later I found some that was bottled, but it was no better. I did find very good passion fruit (maracujá) juice in bottles, and I liked it because it had no sugar, and so I could sweeten it to my taste. It is very difficult to find unsweetened passion fruit juice here. I bought a passion fruit at the food fair, and it was the largest one I had ever seen and was green on the exterior. I used to grow passion fruit in Venice, but mine were dark purple on the exterior and were smaller.

Great pictures! I'm looking forward to more. My wife and I have been to Rio three times. She is a Systems Engineering professor and was running a US/Brazil exchange program along with a couple of Brazilian professors. So she "had" to go there as part of the exchange program.

By the third trip we felt comfortable enough with the city to rent bikes and ride them to the botanical gardens or to take the subway to the Rio Central area or the Zoo.

I even went on a guided walking tour of one of the Favelas which felt a little weird.

Our most memorable food experience was when one of the Brazilian professors took us out to a restaurant that specialized in Moqueca and other food from northern Brazil. It was memorable because of the food, but more so because at the end of the meal when they brought the bill, the Brazilian professor spent 45 minutes arguing and haggling first with the waiter and then the restaurant owner trying to negotiate a better price.

Lovely to hear about your trip. Did the girl walk by?

Islay, the girl did walk by, just in front of Kevin as I was taking a photo of him, but she was readjusting her bikini floss just as I took the photo, and so I won't be posting that!

I just now got my new computer up and running and don't have any photos on it yet, but I will post more once I get Photoshop reinstalled.

Bob, we were going to rent bikes but didn't have time for that. The guy who rents them in Copacabana just down the street from our apartment there was from Manhattan Beach, and we bought out Ilha Grande tour from him. He was very helpful, but he did tell us that if we did rent bikes not to take anything valuable with us when we rode, due to a group of about 10 young boys who steal from riders on the bike paths. Kevin did have his credit card number stolen, but we took care of that within two days of it happening. The fraudulent charges starting showing up from Boca Raton, Florida, and so the information must have been sold to someone there. We spent one afternoon at the Botanical Gardens, and I plan to post some of those photos on some of the garden forums. I took a lot of photos at the national park at Teresopolis that I will post on the Bromeliad forum. For now, I'm just trying to get the rest of the programs installed on my new computer. We went downtown on our last Sunday to visit museums - the Modern Art Museum and the National Museum. The latter was free on Sundays. It was raining a bit that day, and so it was a good day for that. Otherwise we had exceptionally good weather, except for the first day there when Dean had to do business, and we were trying to adjust to the time change and season change. That was the day we had our first pitaya juice.

Lars, it sounds like you had a wonderful trip and a very delicious one!

I didn't learn much Portuguese from Juliana, as I am not a natural mimic and I struggle with inflections and accents. I did learn to say "pony tail", as Ashley at that time had hair long enough to sit upon, and I often put it in a pony tail for her. So Juliana was helping me one morning and offered to "make Ashley's hair". She then asked if we wanted the "tail of a small horse". We asked her to say it in Portuguese and she did. She said it a couple of times before Ashley caught on, but she helped me struggle with it several times and I never got it quite right. And now I've completely forgotten it, I asked Ashley a couple of days ago and she told me, and I still can't make the sounds right! I never managed to learn any Spanish either, although Elery tried for several weeks to teach me basics before we went to Texas and Mexico.

Annie

I had trouble with Portuguese because I found it difficult to pronounce, since the pronunciations do not follow strict rules. I think I could pick it up with some effort, whereas I never mastered French pronunciation, even though the French can understand me - they just hate my accent.

Here's a seafood meal we had June 30 somewhere in Rio after visiting Sugarloaf:

We ordered a platter that had lots and lots of shrimp (heads on), squid, some white fish of some sort, and we also had some crab empanadas for appetizer:

which you can see half-eaten in this photo.

The tartar sauce was very interesting and was very unlike tartar sauce I have had here. It did have mayo, but it also had a lot of shredded vegetables in it, and I could not identify them. I would make it if I knew how. I ate the shrimp with the heads, as they were crunchy, and it was too much trouble to try to peel small shrimp. Kevin peeled all of his, however. My main complaint was that they were too salty, like much of the food in Brazil.

The restaurant was called Siri Frutos Do Mar and was not close to where we stayed. I had pineapple for dessert.

Was the National Museum this one?

We walked by it on the way to the zoo, but didn't have time for both.

No, we went to the National Historic Museum, which I think is downtown. Anyway, it was not far from the Modern Art Museum. We did not go to the zoo, but I would have liked that.

Here are some photos from the National Historic Museum:

First we had lunch at their restaurant, which has railroad tracks running through it.

My first (and only) hamburger in Brazil. It had a pile of very good mushrooms on it, topped with a deep fried hard boiled egg.

Here's the egg cut open. I gave half of it to Kevin, as I'm not much of an egg person. The BBQ sauce was good, however.

Old stove in the museum.

Two old stoves.

Courtyard photo, for no particular reason!

We took lots of photos with our phones in this museum - I did not want to carry around my regular camera, and the phone was easier to use. Most photos were not food or cooking related, however, and so I won't post them here.

I wonder if the link to the restaurant you posted above might be to a different one with the same name? The map link from your link points to a spot somewhere in the middle of Rio, pretty far from anything. A good guess would be that that location would be about an hour of driving from Sugarloaf, and looking more closely at that spot on the map shows that seems to be inside a large shopping mall, in a slightly questionable neighborhood.

Another restaurant with the same name and logo is located on the edge of Barra da Tijuca where much of the new building for the Olympics took place.

Do you remember if the front of the restaurant looked like this?

and the view from outside included this dramatic bridge and the distinctive mountain in the background.

If you will be only posting food-related photos here can you at least post a link here to you postings in other forums so interested Cooking forum can find them and follow along?

I never went to either of the museums you mentioned, so I'd love to see pictures of what I missed. I have been in that area and saw the Municipal Theater, the National Library, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, the Carioca Aqueduct and rode the trolley across it to Santa Teresa, and on my last trip found Selaron's Stairs, which were created over many years by a local artist

I didn't go up the stairs because a couple people warned me that my large camera would make me an inviting target.

After reviewing the photos later I discovered that it I had gone up the stairs, I could have met the artist who was sitting there surrounded be a group of people.

I was just checking out google street view for various places in Rio, and found that the main walkways through the Rio Zoo have been added. So you can now walk around the Rio Zoo in the comfort of your own home.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.9044008,-43.2287005,3a,75y,266.28h,91.71t/data=!3m9!1e1!3m7!1siuowl-mdeMZXvjVV8v-Rjw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i26

Here is an updated link to Siri Frutos do Mar. The one we went to is in Tijuca, as I can recognized from the photos. It was on a corner, and each corner of the intersection had a different seafood restaurant.

Since this thread is old enough now, I will post a few non-food related photos, per your request. I did not want this to seem like a travelogue, however, and was hesitant to stray off topic here. However, at this point, I don't think it will matter much.

Views from the Christ Statue (which everyone takes):

Boats at Ilha Grande:

Volley Futball, at Ipanema:

Juice stand in Copacabana:

Here's a link to the Bromeliad forum thread.

Beach walkway in Ipanema:

DB Kevin at Zaza Bistro in Ipanema:

I'm at work now, but I have more photos at home and will post more later, to show other places in Rio that we went. We would have enjoyed seeing the steps that you showed! Maybe we'll go back in three years, when Dean has to go back again to collect rent.

Thank you for taking us along on your fascinating trip. The landscape, the food, the culture, the people ---Really enjoy reading all, more than once.

I had a somewhat memorable trip to Sao jose, Brazil.

I had just left Argentina, I had a wonderful trip there, but everything was collapsing there, banking, government ---, On my way to Sao Jose. I got to the airport, and had a fight with their currency exchange concessions. They refused to accept Argentinian Money!

When I got to the hotel, there was a big crowd in the hotel lobby. They were all gathering in front of a TV.

The TV was broadcasting in real time that a plane just crashed in Queens New York. Although I couldn't understand the reporter who .was speaking in Portuguese, I was able to hear what was happening because the news was in English. A few eyewitnesses there said they saw the plane exploded in air then crashed.

Official report was different: that the plane's tail mechanicals failed, causing the plane to be out of control and crashed.

dcarch

What plane crash was that? I only remember a plane landing in the Hudson river.

While I was in Rio, there were major demonstrations against the government, and there were several random fires in the city on one particular day. On our next to last day, it was difficult to navigate through the city because of traffic jams caused by the demonstrations. I get a lot more news about Brazil by watching Deutsche Welle than I do from U.S. news stations. Supposedly, Brazil is in near crisis right now, but it was not that evident from being there. My friend Dean had problems with his money changing while he was at the airport to return home, and he ended up taking a different flight from us, the next day.

Last year, I was in Siena, Italy, when I saw the news of the Orlando massacre. We did not watch TV in Brazil, partly because we had poor cable selections, and partly because we had other things to do, especially since there were three of us.

Here's a photo of the road on the way to Teresopolis, which is located in the mountains ahead of us.

I took this photo while in the car - we had an Über driver while we were in Brazil, and he took us all over Rio plus to Teresopolis and the national park there. We took a bus on the day we went to Ilha Grande, however.

This is where we had lunch at Ilha Grande:

Since there were many openings, random birds did fly through from time to time. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, which meant all you can eat until they ran out.

Here's a cafeteria lunch I had in Copacabana, for comparison:

This food is sold by weight and is fairly inexpensive.

That was American Airlines Flight 587 crash in Queens. 260 people died.

As I remember, afterwards there was a lawsuit by eyewitnesses, who refused to accept the official report that it was a mechanical accident.

dcarch