Rio de Janeiro

Rio was capital of the Portuguese Empire-in-exile from 1808, then of independent Brazil until 1960, when Brasília was inaugurated. That century and a half of national centralisation left a food culture that is simultaneously local and aspirational — the city has always had something to prove.

The geography imposes itself. The city sits between the Atlantic, granite mountains, and the Guanabara Bay, which once supplied extraordinary seafood before pollution degraded it. The influence of West African cooking — carried through the slave trade and concentrated in the city’s Afro-Brazilian communities — is more immediately legible here than in São Paulo, most visibly in the feijoada tradition, which functions less as an everyday dish than as a weekly ritual.

The boteco is at its most developed as an institution in Rio. The simple cold beer and salt cod fritter at a neighbourhood bar counter is not a lesser version of restaurant food; it is a distinct category with its own aesthetic, and one that the city has articulated more precisely than anywhere else in Brazil. Contemporary restaurant culture here has, in the past two decades, engaged seriously with this local inheritance rather than simply importing São Paulo trends.