This page has some general information about the way Brazilians eat. See To Market, to Market for food shopping the Brazilian way.
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Breakfast is a simple affair in Brazil: coffee, milk, bread and jam, sometimes cheese and ham, with fresh fruit. My favorite: papaya! (Here's a pretty picture of a papaya I had for breakfast one morning...) In BelΘm do Parß I also had mangoes and a wonderful avocado cream. In Recife, a wonderful grilled cheese I had never eaten before. |
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Whether at home or in a restaurant, meals are sacred: a time to eat, but also to share
precious moments with family and friends. Now, here's a Brazilian custom I miss enormouly:
a decent, sit-down, leisurely-paced lunch and/or dinner. To this day, I have to keep
reminding my husband... "what's the big hurry?"... and I confess that one of the
things I look forward to, when I go to Brazil, are the "family" meals. We have a
joke that, if you see people sitting around a table in the US, having lunch for longer
than 1/2 hour, it must be a business lunch...And also, this abominable thing of sitting at
your desk or in your cubicle, eating lunch while you work is incomprehensible to most
Brazilians, who leave their offices to eat with their colleagues and friends in
restaurants and cafΘs. You guessed, lunch is usually a more substantial meal than in the
US. For lunch and, depending on the location, also dinner, Brazilians have wonderful, inexpensive restaurants where homestyle meals are sold buffet-style by kilo. You just pile the food on your plate and someone will weigh it for you. The same goes for desserts. You order drinks from your waiter and pay him at the end of your meal. Dinner is served much later than in the US. In the big cities, children are a common sight in restaurants at night, since Brazilians will take their kids out to dinner at all hours. For many of my Brazilian friends, though, dinner is a lighter meal of cafΘ au lait, bread, cheese and cold cuts. |
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When you stop to eat at a lanchonete (snack bar) or at a juice bar like this one,
stand around until you finish your food. It's NOT OK to eat on the go...Brazilians do not
eat while walking down the street or while riding the bus or the subway. Also, they will
not have coffee cups and drinks in their cars. They do enjoy stopping at a juice bar for a
sandwich and a glass of freshly-squeezed juice, but will stand around until all the food
is consumed. Brazilians find it rude to eat in places that are not MEANT for
that...(They'll have tiny bags of popcorn at the movies, but that's that. It's quite a
novelty when you first arrive in the US and find out you can pork out in the movie
theaters.) Brazilians drink small - but potent - cups of coffee all day long, at lanchonetes and juice bars. We even have a page dedicated to the traditional Brazilian cafezinho. By the way, Sπo Paulo's answer to Rio's juice bars is a chain of lanchonetes that specialize in esfihas and other yummy savory stuff, called Habib's. So, if you enjoy Arab foods, now you know where to get it! |
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Brazilians will usually use a fork and knife for pizza, open sandwiches, and even chicken. They are amused and even amazed - like my friend Cesar in Columbus, Ohio - at the American way of eating such foods with their hands. The fork is held in the left hand and the knife in the right (unless you're a leftie, of course). I still eat that way while my husband, across the table, will keep swtching the fork from one hand to the other... |
For more on Brazilian foods, please see our Food & Drink Pages, which have a lot of interesting info and beautiful photographs of Brazilian dishes, fruits and vegetables that may be new to you..
