Shrimp Festival Disappointment
The Portuguese word for shrimp is camarão (in England we use the word ‘prawn’ for big shrimps – in America it is the other way round apparently). Well regardless of the name, I love them! So you can imagine my delight the first time I went to my local kilo restaurant on a Friday and saw a sign saying “Festival de Camarão”. I love food, I love camarão – the idea of a festival dedicated to these delicious morsels of the sea set my mouth a-watering!
Not the sign I saw. Not the scene that ensued.
I had visions of little stalls with independent shrimp fishermen and chefs offering up a wide variety of Crustacea, from tiny brown shrimps to massive tiger prawns and everything in between. Perhaps there’d be some entertainment too – maybe some people dressed as shrimp playing music for my entertainment? I pictured dozens of different dishes, from raw shrimp sushi (Aba Ebi is the name apparently) to a hearty prawn stew, shrimp tempura to pan-fried prawns with garlic and chilli…
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| Exhibit A: There can be no denials. I was promised a festival of shrimp. Perhaps the fact that they are offering it every Friday (sexta) should have set alarm bells ringing… |
So you can imagine my disappointment when I entered the Kilo restaurant to find very little out of the ordinary. In fact this so called ‘festival’ was no such thing! They had just cooked 5 dishes using prawns and put these on a separate table. I felt like Wayne and Garth when they visited Picadilly Circus:
Incidentally, I now treat the word ‘festival’ here with a certain amount of distrust. I took some convincing before I would believe that “Rock in Rio” was going to more than just a couple of guys with guitars…
Your local kilo restaurant is "picareta".
Picareta! Thanks Anita, that was like a little Friday afternoon homework assignment :) I now know that a picareta is the word for a pickaxe but is also used to mean a fake or a fraud. And the film Bowfinger was titled Os Picaretas here in Brazil!
Bowfinger is one of the most underrated movies of all time.
A classic.
Have you tried cooking shrimp in the broiler? I tried the method below (starting from 3:50 on) and it worked out really well.
Bom fim-de-semana 2 all.
Okay, I don’t even know if you see this since I comment so late but this one was recommended to me.. Hehe. This happened to me too!!! “Festival” apparently does not mean festival like we think. I was promised a soup festival here in Sampa. I imagined tents with steaming pots of various flavors of soups and hot chocolate and people sitting on blankets on the grass talking and eating soups..Well, it was a buffet of soup with like 8 options. I loved it. I love soup but it was totally NOT a festival.
Hi Susan – I see it! :D Yes, it seems that ‘festival’ here can just mean 5 or 6 themed dishes in the Kilo restaurant! -that ain’t no festival! ;)