Snacks and Street Food
On every street corner in Brazil you will find a lanchonete , a mixture of cafe and bar. They sell beer and rum, snacks, cigarettes, soft drinks, coffee and sometimes small meals. Bakeries - padarias - often have a lanchonete attached, and they're good places for cheap snacks: an empada or empadinha is a small pie, which has various fillings ( carne, meat, palmito, palm heart and camarao, shrimp, the best); a pastel is a fried, filled pasty; an esfiha is a savoury pastry stuffed with spiced meat; and a coxinha is spiced chicken rolled in manioc dough and then fried. In central Brazil try pao de queijo, a savoury cheese snack that goes perfectly with coffee. All these savoury snacks go under the generic heading salgados. If you haven't had breakfast ( cafe da manha) at your hotel, then a bakery/ lanchonete is a good place to head; and for a more substantial meal lanchonetes will generally serve a prato comercial, too. In both lanchonetes and padarias you usually pay first at the till, and then you take your ticket to the counter to get what you want. You can get food at a growing number of fast food outlets in cities, which look garishly American but take the hamburger or hot dog and "Brazilianize" it, much improving it in the process. All sorts of things are added, and the menus are easy to understand because they are in mangled but recognizable English, albeit with Brazilian pronunciation. A hamburger is a X-burger (pronounced " sheezboorga "), a hot dog a cachorro quente; a bauru is a club sandwich with steak and egg; a mixto quente a toasted cheese and ham sandwich. Food sold by street vendors in Brazil should be treated with caution, but not dismissed out of hand. You can practically see the hepatitis bugs and amoebas crawling over some of the food you see on sale in the streets, but plenty of vendors have proper stalls and can be very professional, with a loyal clientele of office workers and locals. Some of the food they sell has the advantage of being cooked a long time, which reduces the chance of picking anything up, and in some places - Salvador and Belem especially - you can get good food cheaply in the street; just choose your vendor sensibly. In Salvador try acaraje, only available from street vendors - a delicious fried bean mix with shrimp and hot pepper; and in Belem go for manicoba, spiced sausage with chicory leaves, or pato no tucupi, duck stewed in manioc sauce.
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