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After starting off the trip with wanting to try Feijoada at the Caesar Park (since it is reputed to have some of the best in the city), Laura and I went off for dinner at one of the only places in Rio that serves the meal daily – Casa de Feijoada. With little more than a couple slices of mango and juice in my tummy, we went looking for a late lunch there… it was 5pm btw. I had been practicing my pronounciation of “fay-zho-a-da,” all week, so now the same way I say “Ho-do-via-ree-ah” for bus station and sound almost like a native, elicits a stream of Brazilian Portuguese to which I then give up all hope of understanding.
Facts I knew about the dish:
You get a lot
It is beans and meat
There is some fat in the dish
You only get it on Saturdays – who knew why?
They give you orange slices with your food.
So we get to the small little restaurant and it wasn’t terribly fancy. It was a 6 block walk down the beach from the hotel, nestled in a little nook intersecting three streets.
We were ushered to a corner table by the window. Immediately, food started to appear at our table… olives, toast, teeny little pots of black bean soup (the waiter demonstrated that we should be sipping this soup)… soon after appeared scoops of fried little sausages … and quite soon after the waiter appeared with two glass bottles. One had an orangey colored liquid in it and the other a pale green. The orangey colored liquid turned out to be passion fruit liquor… or the passion fruit version of a home made, aged and high-powered caipirinha. Caipirinha… mmmm. The pale green liquid was “lime” flavored, and the flavor that I normally associated with the caipirinha. So introductory batidas out of the way.
When the waiter finally came over to ask for the order, we saw the menu and ended up with the “traditional” feijoada but the choice of meats included some of the following and you had the choice of one, some or all of them
Pig ears
Pig Tail
Pig knuckles
Jerk Meat
Chorizo
Regular sausage
Bacon
Beef
Of course, I am just not about eating the non business parts of the animal, so I asked for the Sausage, beef and Jerk, while Laura just ended up with the bacon … we were the only ones in the restaurant at the time and we truly had no frame of reference for the size of the ship that was going to hit us.
Then the food tsunami hit us.
and the video above the picture below don’t capture how much it was.
By this time, it was too late, because the parade of food began again. To our table appeared white rice, black beans, “collard” greens (bright green cabbage), yuca fries, “farofa”, pork rinds, and two large steaming bowls of stew. One bigger bowl contained my concoction of meats , while the other was just filled with huge thick slabs of bacon for Laura.
The overall meal for meal was like a huge hot Creole meal in Trinidad, so I was pretty much in my element. The collard greens by the way…. DELICIOUS … just like pan fried Bhagi without the sada roti. My plate ended up like this …
After eating and eating and barely denting the huge amount of food.. we packaged the leftovers (you have to pay for the containers), we started our waddling back to the hotel. This is the reason, they serve this on Saturday’s only… you need the entire weekend to digest.
