Brazilian Dining

It is customary to dine out for lunch on the weekend.  It gives the cook a day off.  The options here are few as we are far from the nearest Chinese or Italian place.  Everyone heads to their local restaurant to eat exactly what they would have at home.  There will be a buffet of rice and side dishes, a salad bar, and spits of meat grilling over an open fire (yes, indoors!). 

We help ourselves at the buffet, ask for a cut of meat and weigh our plates.  There are plenty of tables squashed together in the one echoing room.  The noise is deafening. Over 200 customers, many of them children, are eating together, and conversation is virtually impossible.  The juicer serving up fresh drinks and the blaring TV add to the general din.  No one seems to mind.  They keep their eye on the dessert table and don't hesitate to complain if something is missing.  On a previous visit there was no cheese put out to have with the sweets on the dessert table.  Our colleague, a regular, complained and was proud to say that they have never been without since. Now there is always fresh white cheese by the banana and guava sweets.

The restaurant owner, after a trip abroad, tried to change the menu.  Customers complained at the less than usual variety of vegetables, salads and pastas.  Brazilians are used to a variety of dishes in one meal. 

I sit down to lunch each day up at the Mission House and I count the number of dishes on the table.  I wonder how long they took the cook to make.  There are never less than four vegetable dishes, rice, beans, salads and at least one meat dish. For me it would be like preparing a Thanksgiving dinner every day and I'm sure I couldn't manage it on less than a eight burner stove. 

This love of variety extends to the Brazilian version of pizza.  Anything can be a topping, sweet or savory.  The menu at a pizza place can be confusing because half of the items would not normally be considered pizza, like stroganoff.  Even this stroganoff topping is the Brazilian variety with shoe-string potatoes sprinkled on top. 

Anywhere else the outside world of experienced diners would have come in and put a stop to this. 'There is no need to prepare so many dishes for one meal, a meat and two veg is enough.'  'Pizza toppings must appeal to meat lovers and sweetened condensed milk is not a substitute for cheese'.  But these rules have no effect here and haven't set the pizzerias straight.  They continue to dream up new dishes and add them to an already full table.

In this picture, our hostess felt we needed one more dish and was frying some eggs as we sat down to lunch.