Culinary Journey

Since we were transiting through São Paulo anyway, to get to Europe, we decided to spend the weekend and explore a little of what the city has to offer.  For the 2 of us a culinary journey is always a winner. We went on to explore the street food of São Paulo as well as a 2 Michelin Star restaurant.

Our Street food tour had a rich and diverse culinary landscape. One of the many fascinating discoveries we made was the deep rooted influence of Japanese immigration on local cuisine. In the early 1900s, a massive wave of Japanese immigrants arrived in São Paulo, escaping poverty and unemployment. Their presence left an undeniable mark on the city's food culture, blending traditional Japanese flavours with Brazilian.

Among the many interesting foods we ate there was the one I enjoyed the most and I felt it deserved a mention.  A creative take on the classic spring roll. This version was reimagined into a pie like snack, although still using the spring roll pastry, stuffed with prawns and paired with a refreshing cup of pure, unrefined, 100% sugarcane juice. Somehow an obvious choice, since we just learnt that Brazil is the worlds largest exporter of sugar cane. 

This was a walking tour that covered quite a large distance, Eric is now 7 weeks post op and this is by far the most amount of walking he has done, surprisingly he did extremely well, with only a little discomfort.

Finally the night has arrived for us to get dressed up and head out to D.O.M the 2 Michelin Star restaurant that we have been waiting to experience for weeks with great excitement and anticipation.

While waiting to be seated we meet a youngish man early 30's,  and get chatting as we do. When we are finally seated our tables are side by side, the conversation continues, until we eventually decided to invade his table, as I found it both odd and interesting that someone of this young age would be eating in this high end restaurant by himself. I now think that he may actually have been celebrating solitude, which with us around, the poor guy never stood a chance to enjoy the quietness of dinning alone and savouring each bite without the interruption of conversation. Well I guess after that night he too had a story to tell. 😊

This restaurant is known for re-defining ones notion on food and what we think is normal, hence creating a blur between fine dining and adventure eating. All products are local, many of which are specifically from the Amazon. Here too I will only discuss one dish and that would be the Amazonian ant .... yes this is not a typo!!!  We ate an actual ANT, this alone was an experience and talking point, it actually tasted quite ok on top of a singular dauphinoise style cassava, it just sat their like a very exclusive piece of garnish 😂, but since it was the star of the dish, it also required eating.

An unexpected encounter, with some rather unexpected food, leaves me wondering ..... Would you dine alone in a Michelin Star Restaurant?

Answer: I certainly would.