There is no single Brazilian cuisine. What people eat changes with the region as sharply as the landscape does, and the most interesting food is usually the everyday kind rather than the version served to visitors.
The idea of a national Brazilian dish survives mostly in airports. On the ground, cooking follows what the region grows, what it inherited and what it had access to: African influence along the north-eastern coast, river fish and cassava in the Amazon, cattle and cheese in the interior, European immigration in the south.
Two towns a thousand kilometres apart will share a name for a dish and cook nothing alike, and that difference is one of the better reasons to visit more than one region.
The most consistently good food in Brazil is not in restaurants aimed at visitors. It is the lunch that working people eat: a plate with rice, beans, a protein, a salad and a regional side, served at midday in a place with plastic chairs and no menu in English.
That meal is the fastest way to understand a region, and it is available everywhere. It is also, almost always, the best value on the street.
A municipal market shows in twenty minutes what a region grows, fishes and preserves, and it does it before you have eaten anything. Fruit that does not exist elsewhere, dried fish, cheeses, flours, peppers — the inventory of a market is a map of the local diet.
Markets are also where you find the food that never reaches restaurants, cooked at a counter by someone who has made the same thing for decades.
Lunch is the main meal and is served early by European standards; dinner is late. Restaurants that sell by weight are common, honest and quick. Service charge is usually added to the bill and is optional in principle, though normally paid.
Dietary restrictions are easier than they used to be in cities and harder in small towns, where a plate without meat may need explaining rather than ordering.
Brazil has two very different wine countries: the cool southern highlands, where the harvest follows the classic southern-hemisphere calendar, and the irrigated
