Brazil > Cousine
By Jessica Lloyd

What's the food like?
Food in Brazil is cheap (like everything else, bar electronics and chocolate), and very tasty, if you like beans and rice that is. Beans in a black sauce and white rice are served with almost everything here. It is very 'typical'. A meal of crumbed fried fish, boiled white rice, beans in black sauce and a garden salad is a very Brazilian meal indeed. You will find a large range of gourmet dishes at the more expensive restaurants here, and there are quite a few of these restaurants. Florianopolis is not expensive by Brazilian standards, Rio de Janeiro takes the cake for the most expensive city in Brazil, though it has a lot of upmarket places to eat, sleep and drink. Floripa lacks the bottom line poverty and dirtiness, which make it a beautiful place to visit, where you can conveniently forget that you are in a third world country.

Brazil is teetering on the edge of Americanisation - it is so close to USA, but is still struggling with deciding which road it wants to take - cheap generally wins out. Food at the supermarket is dirt cheap, with good quality fruit and vegetables at excellent prices. There is no fresh milk available in Brazil, and when the locals were asked in halting cow-milking signals for fresh milk, they laughed loudly. There are no cows here, therefore no fresh milk. For breakfast, Brazilians eat bread rolls with ham and cheese on them, fruit and cereal. The ham and cheese thing happens everywhere and if you go to a hostel or hotel, expect to get this.

Pre-packaged food is expensive, like packet pastas and two-minute noodles (though they are still cheap, just not comparatively). That is because they are all imported from USA. Unfortunately it is quite difficult to find a decent chocolate bar, and these too cost a lot compared to everything else. Stick to the brands you know and trust otherwise you will more than likely be disappointed with low quality, cheap chocolate from the rest.

Brazil is full of places called Churrasco's, which translated, is something like a 'meatery'. It is a buffet restaurant with a large range of salads, and the waiters come around with large metal skewers which hold a choice cut of lamb, pork or beef, chicken hearts or pieces, or Brazilian sausage, and if you say yes please, they will slice it off the skewer until you say stop. The meat is usually excellent and so are the salads - but don't get tricked into taking a lot the first time the waiter comes around! There are so many different cuts of meat you should try them all - eat as much as you like, because it's all included in the price and they come around annoyingly often.

There are always more waiters at restaurants than is really required, their pay is low and they rely heavily on tips - if the restaurant is slow then they don't do well. So, if you can, try to tip well - you are still getting a massive bargain and it ensures if you decide to go back to that restaurant you get good service. There are many other pay-by-the-kilo places, usually good quality and around R$20 per kg.

A standard Brazilian snack is a pastel. These are what most of us call pasties, and is a large parcel of pastry deep fried with some kind of filling, not much mind you. Mince, cheese or chicken are common. They are very nice, though not exactly gourmet. They make eating crap food seem like a good idea, because it's 'Brazilian', therefore you are obliged to try a few. People here eat a lot of bread and bread-type products, and you will find next to the pastels in the food stall/shops a range of small bready things that don't appear to have any discernable name, just a filling. Shredded chicken with something in it that makes it go slightly pink, perhaps a tomatoey sauce, seems to be a favourite for all these shops, or maybe they just all buy them at the same place. These are easy to point at if you don't speak Portuguese.

Brazilian News - Accommodation