Churrasco and the caipirinha are where most travelers start with Brazilian food, and both deserve their fame. Stay longer, though, and you find that Brazil eats differently in every region. Indigenous cassava, river fish and forest fruit, Portuguese and wider Iberian cooking, the West African traditions carried by enslaved Africans, and later Italian, German, Japanese, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants all shaped the table.
If one dish speaks for the whole country, it is feijoada, which Brazilians call their national dish: black beans stewed with salted and smoked pork, sausage and dried beef. The full version, feijoada completa, comes with white rice, sautéed collard greens, orange slices and farofa (toasted cassava flour). A proper one takes the better part of a day, and restaurants serve it on set days that vary by region, typically Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays or Sundays.
The popular story that enslaved Africans invented feijoada from scraps is questioned by some food historians, who point instead to European stews such as the Portuguese cozido.
Day to day, rice and beans (arroz com feijão) are the backbone of Brazilian meals, and cassava runs through everything: toasted as farofa, as the starch (polvilho) in pão de queijo, and as tucupi, the yellow Amazonian broth made from its juice. The food is rarely fiery. Hot malagueta peppers usually reach the table as a bottled sauce you add yourself, though in Bahia they also go into the cooking.
Like its neighbors Argentina and Uruguay, the South of Brazil runs on meat and mate. In Rio Grande do Sul, gaúcho country, a 2003 state law names churrasco (barbecue) the state’s typical dish: meat seasoned with coarse salt and roasted over wood embers on skewers or a grill.
Be sure to make your way to a churrascaria serving rodízio style, where servers bring skewers of different cuts to your table and carve them straight onto your plate. Pace yourself, because the portions are generous.
The same law made chimarrão the state’s symbol drink: yerba mate steeped in a hollowed-out gourd called a cuia, sipped through a straw and passed hand to hand around the circle, a custom thought to come from the Guaraní.
Many families here are of German and Italian descent, so expect good beer, Blumenau’s Oktoberfest each October, billed as the Americas’ largest German festival, and sopa de capeletti (stuffed pasta in broth) in the Italian towns of the Serra Gaúcha.
The Central-West is home to the Pantanal, one of the world’s largest freshwater wetlands, and its rivers feed caldo de piranha, a broth of pounded piranha with onion, pepper, garlic and annatto, served as a starter and said locally to be an aphrodisiac. Pacu, a rich, fatty river fish, is roasted whole, sometimes stuffed, with farofa alongside that may include plantain. In Goiás, try arroz com pequi, rice cooked with a pungent local fruit (eat slowly, since tiny spines hide between flesh and stone), and empadão goiano, literally a big empada, a deep pie of pork, sausage, cheese, chicken, hearts of palm and boiled egg.
The Southeast holds the big cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, where immigrants from Italy, Japan, Lebanon and many other countries settled. Because of that melting pot, you can expect just about any type of cuisine, and inventive fusion dishes, in the big cities.
Inland Minas Gerais is dairy country and the home of pão de queijo (cheese bread), chewy rolls of polvilho, eggs and cheese thought to date back to the state’s farms in the 1700s, when wheat flour was scarce. Its namesake cheese, queijo Minas, is not to be missed: in 2024 UNESCO added the traditional ways of making artisanal Minas cheese, with raw milk and a natural starter called the pingo (drop), to its list of intangible cultural heritage.
Next door in Espírito Santo, moqueca capixaba is fish stewed without water in a clay pot with tomato, onion, coriander, olive oil and annatto (urucum), and no palm oil or coconut milk. The pots are still shaped by hand by the paneleiras (pot makers) of Goiabeiras, in Vitória, whose craft was the first item IPHAN, Brazil’s national heritage institute, registered as intangible heritage, in 2002. Locals like to say that moqueca is capixaba and everything else is just fish stew.
Brazil’s coastal zone runs for more than 8,500 km (about 5,300 miles) through 17 states, so seafood of all kinds is enjoyed all along the shore. In Bahia it meets a strong West African imprint and the secret ingredient of the region, dendê (red palm oil), which gives the food its color and rich, distinctive flavor, alongside coconut milk, dried shrimp and okra. Inland, in the dry sertão (backlands), the table turns to sun-dried and salted meats.
Acarajé is the dish to try first: a black-eyed pea fritter fried in dendê, split open and filled with vatapá (a creamy paste of bread, dried shrimp, coconut milk, peanuts and cashews), more dried shrimp, pepper sauce and a little tomato salad. It is sold from street trays by the baianas de acarajé, women dressed in white whose recipes descend from West African, especially Yoruba, cooking. IPHAN registered their craft as intangible heritage in 2005.
Then order a moqueca baiana, fish or shrimp stewed in a clay pot with coconut milk, dendê, tomato, green pepper and coriander, uncovered at the table piping hot. Or try bobó de camarão, shrimp in a creamy purée of cassava, coconut milk and dendê, served with white rice.
The North is the Amazon rainforest, where most signature dishes have Indigenous origins. The Amazon Basin holds more than 2,400 native freshwater fish species; look for pirarucu, the largest scaled freshwater fish in the world, and tambaqui, the fish most widely farmed in the region. Açaí, caju (the cashew fruit), acerola and passion fruit are at their freshest here. Unlike the rest of Brazil, the Amazon eats açaí unsweetened, as part of a meal with fish or meat and cassava flour.
In Belém, a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy since 2015, we recommend trying tacacá: a hot broth of tucupi with tapioca starch, dried shrimp and jambu leaves, which leave a slight numbing tingle on your lips. It is definitely a different kind of soup than what you are used to at home. Look too for pato no tucupi (roast duck with tucupi and jambu) and maniçoba, cassava leaves cooked for about a week with salted pork, traditionally eaten during October’s Círio de Nazaré procession. Ver-o-Peso, the city’s historic market, shows you the ingredients, and our guide to Amazon food and drink goes deeper.
Cachaça, distilled from fermented sugarcane juice, is Brazil’s own spirit. By law the name belongs only to sugarcane spirit made in Brazil at 38 to 48 percent alcohol. Clear, unaged cachaça goes into the caipirinha. Golden cachaças aged in wooden barrels are for sipping neat.
Beer is the drink of choice, served very cold with fried bar snacks such as coxinha, a breaded chicken croquette. Selling or serving alcohol to anyone under 18 is a crime in Brazil.
Brazil grows nearly 40 percent of the world’s coffee, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and our Brazil’s Coffee Region and Colonial Highlights itinerary pairs coffee country with historic colonial towns.
Brazil makes wine too. In the Serra Gaúcha, the Vale dos Vinhedos earned the country’s first Denomination of Origin in 2012. Our Brazil food and wine tours page shows the itineraries with tastings.
For lunch, look for a restaurante por quilo (also called comida a quilo), a self-service buffet where you fill your plate, weigh it and pay by weight. The format started in Belo Horizonte in 1984 and is now everywhere. It is the easiest way to try a dozen home-style dishes without decoding a menu.
A 10% service charge (serviço) is usually added to the bill and counts as the tip. It is optional; our guide to money in Brazil covers tipping, and our guide to languages in Brazil has the basic phrases.
Food and water: the US CDC recommends the hepatitis A vaccine for unvaccinated travelers to Brazil and suggests considering typhoid vaccination for rural areas or places with poor sanitation. Its general advice is to choose sealed bottled drinks where tap water may be unsafe and, at any buffet, hot food that is steaming and cold food that is chilled. See staying healthy in Brazil for the full picture.
Certainly have a churrasco. Then taste each dish where it was born: acarajé in Salvador’s Pelourinho, tacacá on a Belém and Marajó Island trip, or pão de queijo and queijo Minas on our Rio de Janeiro and the Route of Gold tour through Minas Gerais.
Our Ultimate Brazilian Food and Wine Tour travels through Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and São Roque with cooking classes and wine tastings. Every itinerary we suggest is flexible, and our Destination Consultants can custom design a Brazil trip around what you love to eat. For everything else, start with our Brazil travel guide.
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