We hadn’t visited a restaurant for a while here at the blog. Today we are presenting a 100% off-the-beaten track food experience we had during our trip to Manaus.

We learned about the peixaria do Jokka Loureiro on a blog review (you’ll be pushed hard to find a mention to it on a printed guide, whether in English or in Portuguese) and thrilled with what we read we headed to the fish restaurant, in the São Raimundo neighbourhood, Manaus west (exact location of the restaurant on Google Maps).

The restaurant is at the end of a cul-de-sac. You ring the bell and someone will open the gate for you. The interior of the restaurant couldn’t possibly be more spartan: chairs and tables and hardly anything else. Well, not entirely true, from the height of the restaurant you enjoy a fantastic view of the river Negro which by itself would be a good enough reason to go as far as the São Raimundo neighbourhood.

In Manaus, do as the locals. We went to Jokka Loureiro to feast on some Amazon fish. There is no printed menu, and the options available are truly basic: tambaqui, pirarucú or tucunaré, the finest of the Amazon fish. We had heard of the awesome costillas de tambaqui (tambaqui ribs) and that was what we ordered.

Along with the fish we had some beer and rounded up the meal with dessert. The final bill for 2 reached R$55.

Jokka Loureiro is on Rua São José, 9. The safest and less stressful way of getting there is a cab. Approximately R$20 from the centre of Manaus. The restaurant only opens for lunch, from 11:30 to 15:30, Monday to Saturday. It seemed really popular with the locals.

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In the remote village of São Francisco, aka Cova da Onça, in the south of the equally remote island of Boipeba, there is a restaurant as humble as it is delicious: the Toca da Onça (in English, the Jaguar’s Liar).

The friendly and talkative Orlando manages the restaurant while his wife is the chef. Everything’s quite simple, just a handful of tables a few meters away from the sea. The very same sea from which most of the restaurant’s menu is extracted. Shrimps / prawns, lobster, octopuss and fish. A menu that, as it is quite common along the Brazilian coast, comes in two versions: a printed one, and a “life” version, as seen on the next photo:

We paid R$30 for a large platter of shrimps for two. Our travel mates paid R$55 for a lobster platter so abundant they couldn’t finish it. We asked Orlando how come he could serve fresh lobster during the ban. His answer left us none the wiser.

An excellent spot to have lunch during a trip around the island or just a trip to the village.

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The sorveteria da Ribeira ice-cream parlour is an unmissable Salvador classic. It has a legion of devoted fans, and the local edition of Veja magazine has elected it the best Salvador ice-cream for 10 consecutive years. The sorveteria was founded in 1931 by an Italian inmigrant. In 1962 a Spanish inmigrant bought it from him. For the next 42 years, he run the succesful business. In 2008 a local businessman bought the sorveteria.

The sorveteria is located in the Ribeira (see its location on Google Maps), quite far away from most tourist sights. But it is in the vicinity of the Bonfim church – while you are there, extend your trip to the Ribeira. The Salvador bus, Salvador’s hop-on hop-off tourist bus stops right in front the ice-cream parlour and waits for you while your order your ice-cream.

In spite of its fame, the ice-creams served at the Ribeira have popular prices. R$3 for a cone with a ball, R$4 for two. Outstanding amont the list of flavours there is a long list of exotic fruits: biri-biri, jenipapo, chirimoya, cajá, cupuaçu, mangaba, umbu, sirigüela, graviola, cajarana, acerola. Ice-creams are still prepared in the traditional fashion and the fruits are peeled by hand.

You will find all the information we have on this blog on Salvador at the entry destination: Salvador.

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SENAC is a private organization offering ocuppational training courses. It is financed by the Brazilian private sector. Bang in the middle of the Pelourinho, the best known part of the historic centre of Salvador, SENAC has a restaurant on a building of historical interest.

There is a por quilo restaurant on the ground floor (you pay according to the weight of the food that you eat). If you want to go to the traditional restaurant, take the door to the left and climb the stairs until you reach the restaurant.

The restaurant offers a buffet service. 40 savoury dishes representing all that it is traditional in cuisine from Bahia. And a dozen desserts too. All the dishes have a label with their name (in Portuguese and in English too) but in case of doubt, ask any waitress and she’ll be glad to give you more details.

Hard to resist the dessert section, it is calory galore, but there you go.

The SENAC restaurant is on the main Pelourinho square – ask around, anyone will tell you where the entrance is. It opens for lunch and for dinner (with the exception of Sundays, when it only opens for lunch). In March 2009 the price of the buffet was R$29 (drinks not included).

Right next to the restaurant there is a small and interesting Museu da Gastronomia (entrance is free).

For its exceptional location and for offering a perfect introduction to the local cuisine, the SENAC restaurant is a highly recommended place for a meal.

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One night in Florianópolis we went out for a pizza. We had driven by the Nave Mãe pizza parlour a few days earlier and decided we would give it a go. Only later we discovered it is one of the Florianópolis haunts of local celeb and national heroe Gustavo Kuerten (tennis player). The pizzaria is on the southern shore of the Lagoa da Conceição, where there is a considerable amount of restaurants. Access without a car is not easy.

The dining room has individual lamps on the tables that help it recreate an atmosphere of intimacy. It is quite dark inside.

Nave Mãe prepares its pizzas with wholemeal dough. Its menu is quite, shall we say, ‘lunatic’. The names of the pizzas relate to galaxies and the space race (Saturno, Terra, Soyuz, Sputnik, Cruzeiro do Sul, Siryus, and so on). We ordered a pizza with three different parts. Asteróide (tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni and oregano), Lua (tomato sauce, mozzarella, bacon and oregano) and Soyuz (tomato sauce, mozzarella, ham, ‘catupiry’ cheese and pineapple). R$34 for a large pizza for two.

For dessert, we shared a conventional petit gateau, chocolate cake with ice cream.

What with one thing and the other we spent R$57. For someone who lives in São Paulo it is always difficult to judge pizzas prepared anywhere else – the risk of being unfair in our assessment is noticeable. The pizza was delicious. The base was slightly thickier than we are used to, but prepared with top quality ingredients.

The pizzaria Nave Mãe is on the rua Laurindo Januário da Silveira, 1296.

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Brazil, the largest coffee producer in the world, and we hadn’t mentioned a café in the blog yet. It’s time to make amends.

The Octavio Café is a coffee shop that in its short existence has gained the reputation of being the best café in São Paulo. It is found in the Jardim Paulista upper-class neighbourhood, near the exclusive Rua Amauri.

As you approach the café, the first surprise is provided by its external shape – resembling the form of a coffee bean.

Inside, the café is separated in three big areas: one for smokers, one for non-smokers, and an open-air section. Thankfully, non-smokers got the best part, a beautiful space right in front of the bar.

While you sit on extremely comfortable sofas, you can watch the time go by while you take pleasure in smelling the coffee aromas that permeate the building. The ramp going up the lavatories is full of surprises. From the top there is a wonderful view of the café.

As it is to be expected, the Octavio has a extense coffee menu. Your basic order is a expresso Octavio (R$3,80), the cheapest drink you can order.

There is an extremely tempting Degustação de Cafés (Tradicional, Especial Octavio e Café Importado) (Coffee Tasting) on the menu, costing R$11. However, we’ve been to the Octavio twice and the tasting wasn’t available both times. We wonder whether it’s worth including an attractive item on the menu only to let customers down when they order it.

If you want coffee prepared on a different fashion, you can order coffee prepared on the cafetera francesa (cafetiere, costs R$5,10), a Turkish coffee (R$4,90) or the very traditional café de coador (colander coffee, R$4,90) shown on the next photo. The three coffees serve two cups.

Our only word of warning, beware of the Black Coffee, described on the menu as hot chocolate with coffee. It costs R$7,10 and if you want to feel conned, order it. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Other than that, the Octavio Café is a place worth visiting. Its coffee is not cheap, but then a cup of coffee is unlikely to wreck havoc on your budget.

Octavio Café. Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, 2996. Jardim Paulista. Website.

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Box 32 at the Municipal Market in the centre of Florianópolis, is one of the best known bars in all the region. As popular wisdom states no visit to the market is complete without a stop at the Box 32, we decided to pop in for a quick drink and a snack.

We won’t beat around the bush: the bar was quite a bit of a let down. We ordered the famous and smallish pastel de camarão (a kind of pastry filled with shrimp), price R$5,90. The snacks, on the best McDonald’s fashion, are already prepared, waiting for the customer to place an order. Our pastry came from the shelf of the pastries that had been prepared quite a while ago. It the truth be told, the pastry is filled to the brim with shrimps. But they were probably frozen shrimps, as any hint of tasty flavour was absent from them. We washed down the pastel with an incredibly expensive draught beer (R$5,10).

When it comes to taste, most of the bars at São Paulo’s Mercado Municipal would make the Box 32 extremely jealous. It could well be a bad day at the kitchen. We don’t know. We won’t find out as this was our first and last visit. But check out for yourselves. The wing of the market where the Box 32 is located is quite interesting, with a few fishmonger’s displaying their most recent catches.

Website: Box 32.

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On Pântano do Sul, on the southern tip of Florianópolis [location on Google Maps] you will find one of the most unique places of the entire Brazil: the bar do Arante, Arante’s bar.

A long long time ago, don Arante Monteiro and his wife opened a grocery store for the fishermen of the village. On the 1960s the store was moved to its current location, right by the beach. As the number of visitors to the area increased, dona Osmarina Maria Monteiro – Arante’s wide – began preparing fried fish, and the store became a restaurant.

Come the 70s, Pântano do Sul became fashionable among backpackers from São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. To let their friends know they had already arrived to the village and were camping nearby, the backpackers began sticking notes on the walls of the bar. The practice of sticking a note became so popular than soon the walls of the bar were covered with notes. These days, you will struggle hard to find an empty space where you can stick your note. More than 70,000 of them have been counted, and even a book has been written on the topic.

From the moment you enter the restaurant, it is hard not to be impressed by the verbal diarrhoea exhibited by thousands of tourists that once made a pit stop at the bar. There are notes everywhere, but you will always find a willing waiter or waitress with a pen and a paper should you want to attempt finding a place for your own piece of writing.

Even if it’s only for a beer, do pop in, you will have a fabulous time, your eyes jumping from one note to another, while taking a break occassionaly to contemplate the beautiful view of the Pântano do Sul bay through the windows of the bar.

From its early days, the bar always presented its customers with a glass of cachaça (sugarcane spirit); the tradition goes on.

As we had just arrived in Florianópolis, we wanted to have a go at our first traditional seqüência de camarão, the contents of which I will detail next. But it should be noted that the restaurant à la carte menu contains many alternatives (including shrimps and oysters) and a full lunch for two, including fish, for R$38). Soft drinks cost R$2, and beers from R$3.

The seqüência de camarão is a shrimp-based dish typical from Florianópolis. The seqüência served at the bar do Arante is more expensive than the one you will find at the restaurants by the Lagoa da Conceição, but it is also far richer. In actual fact, the meal is so abundant it becomes an exaggeration. There is absolutely no way you will be able to eat all the food that will land on your table. To begin with, shrimps prepared in three different ways (steamed, breaded and with oil and garlic); crab meat and fish bites.

Then, two beautiful oysters au gratin.

Then and endless platter of mussels.

And when your stomach can’t possibly accept any more food, there it comes the main dish, two largish fish filets on a shrimp sauce, along with pirão (sauce for the fish), rice, fries and a salad.

The seqüência for two people costs R$72. We wouldn’t order it again. It’s far too much food and wasting food is not something we are keen on. But there is a seqüência for three people (R$86) and another one for four (R$96) where we suspect the amount of food is more balanced.

Of all the ingredients we tasted, the fish filets got the highest marks. Absolutely delicious. The shrimps were actually a bit of a let down. Regardless of what you order, the bar do Arante is an unmissable stop in any trip to Florianópolis. Do not be surprised if you find don Arante walking along the tables and enjoying his well-deserved local celebrity status. He is friendly to everyone and specially keen on getting his picture taken along all the women who come and ask.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I state that the restaurante da Luzia is a truly unique place. You will soon understand why. Getting there is quite an adventure. The easiest leg of the journey involves getting to São Luís do Maranhão, a three or four-hour flight depending on where you are in Brazil. In São Luís you will board a bus that will take you to Barreirinhas in four hours. Then you will take the boat that goes down the river Preguiças as far as Atins - a five-hour navigation. In Atins you will drench yourselves on sunblok and after a two-hour treck you will reach an isolated hut in the middle of the dunes with an unconscipicuous sign at the door that reads: “Restaurante da Luzia”.

Luzia lives with her husband and offspring on a hut in the middle of the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park. She was already there when the park was created, and now the authorities want to remove her from her home. There is no electricity or running water. A few tables are her dining room. One day a tourist that had lost his bearings appeared at the hut, and she cooked for him. It was an instant success. Since then, her prawns are a powerful magnet that attracts the few visitors that reach the remote area. Even the best description of the delicacies Luzia prepares wouldn’t do justice to her cooking. I won’t even try. The only way of paying her back is to recommend a visit to her restaurant. You can arrive there in the morning, book your lunch (there are only three tables, you have to order your dish so she can cook it beforehand), and go for a shortish trek around the nearby dunes.

Luzia also offers acommodation, including a few hammocks. Luxury you will not get. But at R$5 the night slept on the hammock (2006), you couldn’t really ask for more.

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Sabor do Mar restaurant, in Paraty, is not a veteran, having opened its doors only recently. However, in a short period of time it has established itself as one of the best options for food in town.

Sabor do Mar specializes on fish and seafood, and it excels in both departments. Within the restaurant itself there is a fish market from where the client can choose the fish he wants to eat.

The à la carte menu is not cheap, as you would expect from a seafood restaurant. But the set meal is excellent, for R$30 two people can eat fish and seafood.

The restaurant is a few hundred feet from the tourist office, within the historic part of the Paraty.

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