In Rio de Janeiro, Juice Bars That Are More Than Juice
By SETH KUGEL
If you caught the recent front page article in the Times entitled “Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of $35 Martini,” you know how expensive Brazil has become. By some measures, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are now more costly than London or New York or Oslo — amazing considering that some of their municipal services are more like those in La Paz or Dakar.
Needless to say Brazil’s booming economy and strong currency have made it a difficult place to travel on the cheap. I’ll never stop recommending Rio de Janeiro as a destination, but these days surviving a budget trip to the city requires a few tricks.
Today I’ll share one: for way less than the price of that $35 martini, you can eat three very Brazilian, generously portioned, surprisingly healthy meals a day without setting foot outside the upscale beachfront haven of Ipanema.
Here’s the key: the city’s freewheeling, fast-moving corner juice bars, where countermen take your order and appear to yell it — “orange with papaya, no sugar!” — into a wall of pineapples, guavas, apples and mangoes. A minute or two later, a glass appears from an opening in the wall, filled with ice-cold, frothy, delicious juice. You down it at the counter, and head off to the beach.
At least, that’s what many tourists think that these juice bars – most of which are small, Rio-only chains – are about. Far from it. They are also restaurants, somewhat akin to New York’s Greek diners, with deep menus that range from morning coffee to cheap savory snacks to bargain rice-and-beans lunch plates and healthy sandwiches for the bikini-clad set on route from the gym to the beach. Since the food is not just varied but cheap, very Brazilian and largely healthy, a traveler could almost eat every meal there for a week.
Or at least a day. Which is what I did last week at Beach Sucos, my personal favorite, at No. 198 on Rua Visconde de Pirajá, the main drag of Ipanema. (There are two other locations.) My goal: to go further into the menu than I had before, to create a sample full-day menu and to see what a typical breakfast, lunch and dinner would cost.
If it struck the friendly, if frenzied, workers as odd that I kept coming back for more, they didn’t let on. They are used to regular customers, especially the workers in local shops who live in far less wealthy neighborhoods and can’t afford the prices in the typical Ipanema dining spot. The fact that I was taking photos of everything didn’t seem to faze them either: they’re also used to camera-happy tourists.
I’ll get to my sample three-meal day below, but first, a breakdown of what you can get at Beach Sucos since the menu is in in Portuguese, and a lot of available items aren’t even on it, but are posted on the wall or labeled behind the counter. (Other chains’ menus are quite similar.) It can be confusing. No wonder visitors tend to default to the same order every time like, oh, say, suco de graviola.
Sucos (juices): The choices are endless. The list on the wall has 38 fruits, from the familiar — orange and pineapple, lime and watermelon – to the unusual: fruits from the Amazon and Cerrado regions like cupuaçu, cajá and my new favorite, the pearlike mangaba. They are not all available at all times of year, and some harder-to-transport fruits are available only in frozen pulp. To find out, ask if a certain juice is “natural,” the Portuguese word that vaguely means “fresh-squeezed.” There is a separate list of sucos especiais (special juices), mostly mixes like pineapple and fresh mint, a refreshing why-didn’t-we-think-of-that Brazilian standard. A useful phrase here is “sem açucar,” meaning “don’t add sugar.”
Açaí: Before the deep purple blueberry-shaped açaí fruit became acontroversial health-food craze across the world, its frozen pulp mixed with granola (you eat with a spoon) or banana or infused with ginseng or guarana became a staple of the Rio juice bar scene. (Note that it’s presweetened, so no “sem açucar” option here.)
Vitaminas: The term for milkshakes, which apparently are believed by Brazilians to have lots of vitamins. Notable is the abacate option – made from avocados.
Unusual mixes: You’ll spot posters advertising healthy-sounding blends that combine juice with ingredients like wheat grass and flax. They have names like the Bahian bomb.
Salgados: Not listed on the menu, these “savory things” under the glass counter are pretty standard across Brazil, generally consisting of some sort of dough (baked or fried) and some sort of filling of meats or cheeses or hearts of palm. They’re cheap and filling.
Breakfast: Coffee, buttered toast, omelets and fruit salad give an especially dinerlike vibe to the place in the morning.
Hot sandwiches: Several categories on the menu fall under this rubric, ranging from the classic misto quente (grilled ham and cheese) to filet mignon and chicken filets (filet de frango) to a huge list of hamburger varieties with various toppings. Note that many juice bars use the shorthand X-burguer to mean cheeseburger, since the Portuguese word for the letter “X” sounds a lot like “cheese.” Adorable, unless you’re an unsuspecting lactose-intolerant tourist.
Sanduíches naturais (“natural sandwiches”): Again, the word natural means something a bit different than in English – it refers to sandwiches that are not grilled and generally less greasy. We’re talking chicken salad, ricotta cheese, that sort of thing.
Pratos executivos (“executive plates”): Around lunchtime on weekdays, Beach Sucos fills up with workers who are no way paying what tourists and upper-class residents shell out in area restaurants. Executive plates (not that you’re likely to find any executives eating them) are meat-rice-beans-salad combos that anyone who has been around Latin America will recognize.
Pizzas and crepes: They don’t look good, but I didn’t test them out.
Doces (sweets): Beach Sucos offers the classic brigadeiro (a super-rich trufflelike bonbon made with condensed milk, butter and cocoa powder and coated in chocolate sprinkles), the quindim (a super-rich egg yolk and coconut sweet) and cakes sold by the slice.
Here’s the sample menu I developed (though I actually ate much more than I list here for sampling purposes), with prices in reais (at 1.68 reais to the dollar). Some items are meant to be split with a companion.
Breakfast (13.35 reais)
1) Orange juice (3.50 reais): It’s fresh squeezed, of course. Also good mixed with papaya juice.
2) Cafezinho (1.20): Coffee, served at your table with steamed milk.
3) Half of a large fruit salad (4.25): Enormous and delicious.
4) Half a ham and cheese omelet with toast (4.40): Not a work of art, but tasty.
2) Cafezinho (1.20): Coffee, served at your table with steamed milk.
3) Half of a large fruit salad (4.25): Enormous and delicious.
4) Half a ham and cheese omelet with toast (4.40): Not a work of art, but tasty.
Lunch (19.40 reais)
1) Jabuticaba juice (4.80 reais): The juice of the cupuaçu, fruit, which has a white pulp and a grapelike taste, is a must to try if in season. Finding it anywhere else in the world is just about impossible.
2) Prato executivo: chicken stroganoff (12.00): Served with salad, rice and French fries. Brazilians have made stroganoff their own, and Beach Sucos does a pretty good version.
3) Dessert: Brigadeiro or quindim (2.60).
2) Prato executivo: chicken stroganoff (12.00): Served with salad, rice and French fries. Brazilians have made stroganoff their own, and Beach Sucos does a pretty good version.
3) Dessert: Brigadeiro or quindim (2.60).
Dinner (12.30 reais)
1) Clorofila Mix (4.90 reais): One of the odd special juice concoctions, with wheat grass, guarana, flax, pineapple and kiwi.
2) Ricotta and spinach sandwich (7.40): Under the “sanduíches light” category.
2) Ricotta and spinach sandwich (7.40): Under the “sanduíches light” category.
Grand total: 45.05 reais, or $26.80
That leaves you still $8 shy of the cost of that martini, but who drinks martinis in Brazil anyway? For $8, you can afford to get four mighty stiff caipirinhas from street vendors in the downtown party district of Lapa. But believe me, two will be quite enough.
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