In pickles we trust

It's funny how a cold sunny day in Sao Paulo can spark your craving for good food... Hadn't had a gastro food day like yesterday in a looong time. 

From the northeastern Brazilian cuisine to an "anti-customers always right" sandwich joint, these places are worth a visit.

And trust me, if you want to go to Mocoto in the Zona Norte of Sao Paulo, get there early! And I mean leave home at 10:45... Otherwise your in for a 3 hour wait. 

We got there at 12:15, had a baby in hand, so waiting time went down to 1:30, but Lucca (more his mom, Cris... Hahah) didn't want to wait so long, and we ended up eating next door at the "Esquina Mocoto" - same chef, different menu, and a lot more expensive: yet still one of my favorite places in SP.

Highlight of our lunch were the tapioca dice, my palmito pupunha and bisteca, and the brazilian nut pacoca with coffee. If you like some slimy quiabo, go for the yuca nhoque too! But if you make it to the original place early or you're willing to wait, be sure to try the siriguela caipiroska (with vodka). The best ever..

In the afternoon we wanted to try out the Ben & Jerry's new shop on Oscar Freire, but come on people.. Who stays in a line that long?? 

It is apparently their largest store yet, but I found it disapointingly small. Good surprise was the knitting intervention in front of it! Reminded me of Malikoo (malikoo.com) :)

On our way to leave, we stumbled on some pretty cool places - sat at a small sandwich joint called ZDELI for a pastrami and mustard with pickel sandwich (they don't alter ingredients, so my awesome tomato came on the side) with pink lemonade. Yummyyy!! Next to it a macaron little store run by the french owner that is in the store was a great touch to a frustrared ice cream quest! 

Ha! Quem disse que São Paulo não presta?

Caro... Mas valem a pena! Attimo e Butchers Market são dois lugares que fui recentemente e curti! Muitos mais ainda por vir já que estou renovando minha lista de restaurantes a conhecer na Big Maçã - versão brasileira da Big Apple ;P

Pra variar, boa compania eh essencial... Assim foi a ida ao Attimo: cozinha que mistura italiano com comida caipira (ahn?! Foi meu primeiro pensamento...) vale cometar que estou virando crasher de coisas inusitadas - depois de ser honeymoon crasher da minha irmã, essa noite fomos "date night crashers" da Bia e do Pedro :)

Regra da mesa em restaurante novo: ninguem pode pedir o mesmo prato que outra pessoa vai pedir, afinal, dividir e conquistar o menu é preciso... E se o prato é ruim, 2 se dão mal. Fica a dica ;)

Pedimos 4 pratos diferentes e todos foram compartilhados e devorados! O campeao da mesa foi o Fusili com linguica!!!!

Ja o Butchers Market vale mais a pena pelo clima do local - me senti num daqueles restaurantes nos becos de NY... Se quer um hamburguer, St. Louis ainda esta ganhando no meu coração ( localizado no meu estomago by the way)

Mas o lugar vale a visita! Ainda mais quando é amigo que vem de loooonge e não foi numa churrascaria!! Gafe master! Sorry Dominik! Na próxima eu não falho!!!

Im gonna have to run A LOT...

...to burn this stuff!

Missing our friends, me and Marcelo decided to test out The Maple Syrup ribs! Oh My God! And to top it off, a couple of spoons of ice cream turned into a whole Hagen Dazs belgian chocolate bucket!

And there we were thinking that we did a good job this morning running 5k in the rain... To be fair, people who run in cold and rainy weather should burn twice the calories! Hahahahahaa

Well Peter, this one's for you! And by the way, it was Canadian stuff :) 

Como te llamas?

Welcome to Bogotá, Colombia. Not only is the food great, the prices are fair and you get to see Llhamas on the way to the old city center. If you´ve been here before, share your favorite places. If you plan on going but haven´t had a chance just yet, here goes a couple of pretty great ones that me and Ana Maria went to! Like I´ve mentioned before, great food is where great friends meet, and maaan did we eat well!                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dinner #1 I must admit, was my favorite. One of the best Burratas I´ve ever had in my life (my other favorite had been sole king for quite some time - a cute place in Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro, called Emporio Maria Maria... oooohhh, it´s amazing, trust me). As you can see, didn´t even have time to click it as it was initially, we dug in without a second thought! The scallops (my favorite) were also were amazing, as was everything else. 

Word for the wise-chic, or as we put it "finas", if you order the asparagus with mushroom in the back of the picture, don´t go for a spoonful of the "mashed potatoes"... fancy place, but fancy as I am, I couldn´t swallow a spoonful of mayo! As Mary Poppins would put it, a spoonful of mayo makes the food wanna come out.... ok.. maybe she wouldn´t put it that way, but that´s how I did. By the way, this place is called Harry Sasson.  

Sunday was brunch day! We went to a place called Criterion, and arrived at 12:30... but the brunch is only served till 1:00pm (shock face!!) Exception to the croissant, and as you can see, Ana Maria´s Huevos Benedictos con Salmon, everything else was just ok. However, we had champagne, so all is good!
After a touristy day - I´m sorry, everybody told us to go to the Gold Museum, which we did, but word for the wise #2 - don´t go on sunday! It´s free, but that´s only cause you won´t be able to see anything as it was SO packed! So off we went to eat some more. We ended up in La Gaira! It´s Carlos Vives´ place, and it´s well worth going! Make a reservation, it gets really busy! Heard they have really great live music, but we weren´t fortunate in that department. But the music other than the live one was great, and the food was super fun! As you can see by the pictures, we had the world´s biggest Patacon (a banana chip-ish kind of dish), and Mojitos made with Corozo, a local fruit. We remembered quite a lot of our friends, while eating, drinking, and singing "Quiero... casarme con..." well, you know the tune ;)

And as the weekend ended, we said goodbye over a warm and comforting plate of Linguini - perfect for the gloomy, grey and rainy goodbye day... DiLucca was super nice - we had the restaurant all to ourselves, and the bill... OMG you wouldn´t believe it if I told you... great service, great olive oil, and a great way to close the meet-up :) Osea, see you soon!

It all started on an innocent Sundae...

Nope. Not misspelled... Sundae is where (not when) the idea of this blog came from. I had never heard of a Bacon Sundae. Yes, ice cream + crispy bacon - sounds horrible, but I'll come back to this. Until a skinny, health conscious, runner brainy friend with William Bonner's hair ( ha ha, yes, bonner - look him up, he's a big deal in Brasil) from Madrid / USA / Scotland but Canadian at heart called Elliot mentioned it.

And after a year of mind-blowing food, friend filled reunions, and LOTS of wine, laughter and bullying Elliot with the friendly nickname of fat elliot, I decided to pay an honor to great food - which brings great people together.

Today I finally stumbled upon a bacon sundae on a menu in my favorite hamburger joint in Sao Paulo called St. Louis. It felt like a clog in my heart, tasted weird - a mix of crunchy, creamy, sweet and meaty (kind of how I feel now that everybody parted their ways, minus the meaty part, you can replace this with a bitter feeling) but brought a bunch of great memories to mind and I decided to try it out and put into action this blog - something I've been talking about for at least the past 2 months. A new experience, and definitely worth trying.   

Now, I mentioned he was skinny right? So you might be asking yourself, why "FAT"elliot? Well... maybe I'll reveal it later on, so you keep checking back to find out this, and also great places to eat while visiting amazing places with your own favorite people :)