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Thanks to Tony Bourdain, and his great No Reservations TV show (“Sem Reservas” in Brazil) many people outside of Brazil are familiar with the famous Mercado Municipal in São Paulo, and its renowned Sanduíche Mortadella at Bar do Mané.  Few visitors to Rio though have any idea that the Cidade Maravilhosa also has a great city market, known as CADEG –  Centro de Abastecimento do Estado da Guanabara, located in the Zone Norte neighborhood of Benfica.  CADEG (pronounced Kah-Day-Gee) however is all business, and while larger and filled with a wide variety of excellent and well priced foodstuffs, and cooking equipment, is not as beautiful or tourist friendly as the Mercado.  While it does not have a famous mortadella sandwich or beautiful architecture, it is loaded with excellent restaurants, serving market workers, shoppers, and locals looking for a good lunch.  These are extremely discerning consumers, and there are many excellent dining options here, but Barsa is widely accepted to be the best of the lot.

Barsa is an unpretentious place — pretensions don’t sell well in informal Rio — especially given its high gastronomic ambitions, with tables lined up along the hallway of the market.  The food is simply magnificent.  The cooking at Barsa is more akin to what you might be served in somebody’s home — somebody who knows how to cook really well — than in a restaurant.  The Luso-Brazilian food is served in big dishes to be shared, family style.

My favorite dish is the Paleta de Cordeiro Assada ao Molho Vinho Porto, a beautiful roast shoulder of lamb in red wine sauce, with potatoes and red onions.

Also excellent is the Bacalhau Rei, large pieces of salt cod sautéed in garlic with potatoes, onions, olives, hard boiled eggs, and capers.

Also on the menu is Rabbit Casserole, Roast Duck, and the hard to find Galinha ao Molho Pardo, chicken stew in a sauce thickened with its blood.

To drink is excellent Choppe Brahma, draft beer, served ice cold in frozen glasses, or you can buy a bottle at one of the wine stores in the market and the staff will open it for you for a small charge.

The food here is special, and for me one of the best illustrations of what cooking can and should properly be — but no longer is in much of North America and Europe — and what is still available in pockets of the world for those willing to look for it.  Especially in North America, and increasingly in Europe, it is no longer sufficient for cooks to be skilled craftsman, but instead they seek to convince their patrons that they are inventive and innovative artists.  For this new generation, the state of cooking as they have found it is too simple and unworthy of their participation and perpetuation, and furthermore is subject to great improvement through their own creativity and inventiveness.

What these “contemporary” cooks don’t realize however, is that traditional food such as this is not at all simple, but in fact is the exact opposite.  The reality is that cooking traditions such as these are part of a spontaneously developed order created through the extensive interactions of innumerable persons, throughout multiple generations, spanning centuries and various geographic locations.  This is a far more complicated product than any modernist’s conception of so-called “molecular cuisine,” “cozinha contemporânea,” or the like.  It is so complicated that no one person working alone, in one spot, at one time, could possible invent it.

This is, incidentally, why Barsa calls their cooking “cozinha colonial.”  The Paleta de Cordeiro  and Bacalhau above for example, are the collective products of no fewer than six centuries of cooks, combining the collective knowledge and products of no fewer than three (and arguably four) Continents through which the Portuguese Empire once spanned, brought together as the result of small tweaks and improvements over long periods of time.  It is highly unlikely for any one person at any one period of time, to be able to improve such carefully honed traditions developed through such spontaneous order, and much mischief has ensued as a result of such conceits.  I understand that such thinking is the fashion in much of the world — including increasingly in Brazil — but I am not going along with it, and have started this blog to point out those fighting these trends by continuing traditional forms of cooking.

If you feel similarly, you should make the trip to Barsa.  Benfica is a bit out of the way for visitors who typically stay in Zona Sul, but a trip to Barsa is a good excuse to see what lies on the other side of the mountains, through the Rebouças Tunnel.  A taxi from Zona Sul would probably cost around R$40-50 or so (offset by the much more reasonable food prices on this side of Corcovado), and you can combine a trip to CADEG with a visit to Quinta da Boa Vista, the home of Dom João VI, the King of Portugal who ruled his empire — including Goa, Macão, and of course Portugal — from Rio after Napoleon conquered Lisbon.  (For an excellent English language history of the Portuguese Court in Rio, and Rio’s time as the Metropole of the entire Portuguese Empire, you might want to take a look at Patrick Wilcken’s “Empire Adrift — the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro.”

Keep in mind that the shops of CADEG mostly close by lunchtime, so get there early to look around, before settling in for a leisurely lunch.  Barsa is a true gastronomic destination, well worth the trip, and a good excuse to get off of the tourist track.

Rua Capitão Félix 110, rua 4, lojas 4 e 6, Benfica. Open every day from Noon to 16h. Tel: 2585-3743.


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