A foreign visitor walking through Praça Brasil, a tree-lined square in the Amazonian port city of Belém, might think that the whirring blenders of a dozen nearby food carts are creating the most authentic açaí bowls on earth.
That would make sense, because Belém is the capital of the state of Pará, the global epicenter for the cultivation, harvesting and export of açaí, the blueberry-turned-superfruit doppleganger that rules smoothie shops around the world. But in Belém, the deep purple fruit is consumed mostly as a savory garnish for fish and shrimp, and the concoction sold at Praça Brasil — called guaraná da Amazônia — is a protein-rich smoothie whose ingredients include cashews, peanuts and a syrup . made from guarana seeds, which resemble coffee beans in appearance but surpass them in caffeine content.
Smoothies are rarely available outside the Amazon. The same could be said for many dishes popular in this food-obsessed city of 1.5 million, those made from fresh ingredients – with indigenous names like tucupi, jambu, taperebá and pirarucu – that are difficult to eat in Rio de Janeiro, not to mention outside Brazil. This fall I visited Belém for three days and ate myself to death, hitting about 20 restaurants and snack bars, devouring food and drinks so different even from the Brazilian norm that I felt like I’d stumbled into a secret culinary realm.
Attractions in an Amazon port city
A “guaraná da Amazonia” costs around 20 reais, or just over 4 dollars at 4.90 reais per dollar, and yes, it can be ordered with an açaí blend. But smoothies are better with bacuri, a fruit with apple-adjacent notes that everyone apparently likes. Add it to the list of ingredients that you will find outside the region only frozen, if not even frozen.
That’s because fresh bacuri, like many other regionally grown ingredients, travels poorly. So do many tourists, whose only urban stop in the Brazilian Amazon is the not-so-delightful Manaus, five days by boat or two hours by plane from Belém, and the most accessible base for venturing into the rainforest eco-resorts or on imaginative boat trips.
This will change, however, as Belém upgrades its infrastructure to welcome thousands of visitors in 2025, when it will host COP30, the thirtieth edition of the United Nations conference on climate change.
Visitors will find Ver-o-Peso, a bustling market selling Amazonian fish, fruit and Brazil nuts; exclusive restaurants and shops Docas station, set in renovated 19th-century riverside warehouses; and a historic center that ranges from charming to dilapidated and which houses the only boutique hotel in the city, Quinta das Pedras lobby. There are also getaways ranging from day trips to nearby Combu Island for a taste of river life or overnight excursions to the 16,000-square-mile Marajó Island, home to countless water buffalo (and their meat and cheese ).
While the wider region offers these and other rainforest adventures, the three main attractions of the city of Belém are breakfast, lunch and dinner. Fittingly, one of the city’s most recognizable influencers is all about food.
Marcos Antônio Gonçalves Bastos, known by his childhood nickname, Medici, documented the local cuisine in his instagram accounts. He compares Belemenses to Italians in the way they care for and protect local tradition. “They say something made a certain way should never change,” Medici said, citing outrage among purists when someone added beets to shrimp soup called tacacá to create a Barbie version this summer.
True tacacá is opaque yellow because its base is tucupi, perhaps the region’s most distinctive and addictive flavor, created centuries ago by indigenous groups. Tucupi is made by squeezing the bitter maniac root, letting the tapioca starch settle while the liquid ferments, then adding spices and cooking it for days to remove the naturally occurring, poisonous hydrogen cyanide. The result is not so much sweet and sour as sour and sweet, and pairs magically well with rice and fish, and is the star of the local duck dish, “pato no tucupi”.
Sometimes tucupi acts like a broth, other times it’s more of a sauce or, when mixed with hot chili peppers and bottled, a condiment. Medici, who joined me for part of my culinary extravaganza, simply calls it “my blood.”
Tucupi becomes tacacá when paired with tapioca starch, small dried shrimp, and another indispensable and ubiquitous staple of Amazonian cuisine: the jambu plant, whose leaves and sometimes flowers are added indiscriminately but deliciously to almost everything, including cocktails. It contains a natural anesthetic that causes a pleasant numbness on the lips and tongue which, counterintuitively, enhances the other flavors. “Tucupi and jambu are like our ham and cheese,” Medici said. “If we could put them in everything, we would.”
Tacacá is such a popular street food that it often lends its name to street stalls or casual restaurants that serve a range of other dishes, just as a taco stand might serve quesadillas and burritos. I had lunch one day at Tacaca MJsandwiched between a watch repair kiosk and a candy kiosk, run by an amiable young man named Diego Lublime, who keeps things as tidy as possible considering the restaurant’s seating area is just a row of plastic chairs sharing quickly a busy downtown sidewalk – pedestrians walking.
“Sit down! Have lunch!” she told me, and I got the combo plate of vatapá, caruru and maniçoba, topped with the predictable tangle of jambu. Vatapá is a creamy shrimp stew, caruru a shrimp and okra porridge thickened with cassava flour, and maniçoba a pork stew whose main ingredient is maniva, ground bitter cassava leaves cooked for about seven days to remove the cyanide. Dishes with the same names exist elsewhere in northern and northeastern Brazil, but with variations. In the state of Bahia, vatapá is primarily a peanut and cashew-based side dish, while in Pará it is a nut-free main dish.
An axiom of adventurous eating is that if you like everything, you’re doing it wrong – and maniçoba is where I drew the line, finding it too bitter and its color and texture too close to cow manure. To find out if you disagree, I recommend comparing your likes and dislikes Amazon at Cuia, a sort of Paraense tapas restaurant where local classics are served in small gourds called cuias and cost from 18 to 49 reais. They include everything I had from Tacacá MJ, as well as the tacacá itself and the famous duck with tucupi. By the end of the meal, your lips will be numb and you’ll know what you want to try again.
Sweet and savory delights
After sampling a few basic dishes, I sampled fruits that most visitors have never heard of bluea local ice cream shop whose flavors included taperebá, bacuri, tucumã and cupuaçu, a beloved relative of cocoa that tastes unpleasantly medicinal to me.
I also tried the açaí in its velvety and tasty version as a side dish. Finer options are found in popular family and tourist spots like Punto do Açaí OR Ver-o-Açaí, but at Ver-o-Peso Market, counter workers run fresh açaí through a machine that removes the paper-thin layer of pulp from the stones and adds water. I quickly realized that the açaí I’m used to isn’t really açaí but a candied version, much like another Latin American export originally consumed in bitter liquid form.
“I like to compare it to chocolate,” Medici said. “Chocolate is not chocolate cake. “Chocolate cake contains chocolate.”
At the Ver-o-Peso Market, I opted for a place known for its seafood rather than its much-vaunted açaí Box from Lucia. (Oddly enough, “box” in Portuguese means stall, with the numbers 37 and 38 being Lúcia). There I ordered a shrimp and fish dish with rice, beans and a refreshing coleslaw-like salad, for 70 reais. While juicy, thick-crusted prawns are Lúcia’s most famous dish, it was also where I fell in love with filhote, the meat of juvenile piracui (a type of catfish) that is soft and tender if slightly too soda to be called custard. .
But unlike other local fish like tambaqui, filhote is wasted by frying it. In an upscale restaurant outside the city center called Restaurant from Villa Prime, Medici and I had a filhote appetizer called avuado, which is a dish of delicate, juicy mini-fillets grilled and seasoned with olive oil and garlic. We also inhaled a hot caldeirada, or stew, where filhote, surprise, tucupi and jambu were cooked.
Extremely convenient
With so much good food available on the streets, it would seem almost superfluous to go to Belém’s upscale restaurants like Restô da Villa. But with the current state of the Brazilian real, even the most valuable places are extremely affordable and go out of their way to highlight local ingredients.
THE House of SaulNamed after chef Saulo Jennings, it offers creative dishes such as smoked pirarucu carpaccio: thin slices of the large pirarucu fish topped with jambu pesto and cupuaçu jelly and sprinkled with chopped Brazil nuts (58.90 reais).
On the gloss Santa Chicoria, Pirarucu is imagined with “three textures” of cassava – chips, foam and tucupi – for 81 reais.
On their cocktail menus, both restaurants feature one of my favorite ingredients: taperebá, a fruit with dark yellow flesh and a creamy tropical flavor.
Taperebá is not exclusively Amazonian: the same species is known as “cajá” in other parts of Brazil and as pig plum or yellow mombin in some Caribbean islands. But Medici begs to differ: even if genetically it is the same fruit, he said that “it is influenced by the terroir – by the variations in the soil and climate” of the Amazon. And, considering how delicious the taperebá jam I brought home now on my morning toast is, I’m not inclined to argue with him.
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