Eat the Amazon

[2024: I’m slowly going through the old blog posts and removing links to things that no longer exist – not sure if I’m said about so many things closing, or proud that Eat Rio has outlasted them! Anway, in posts like this, almost everything has ceased to exist, so non-functioning links have been deactivated – click them all you like, they won’t take you anywhere!]

A little while back someone contacted me through my blog and asked if I’d be interested in doing a little writing work. “What kind of writing work?” I asked suspiciously. Oh, it would involve you having to recommend and review restaurants around Rio, they replied. “Hmmm” I said (in my best suspicious voice), “I’ll think about it…”.

Anyone who knows me will know that I love food. I love eating it, I love cooking it, I love discovering new ingredients, new dishes and new styles of cooking. So the thought of getting to pretend that I’m a food critic, swanning around Rio and (hopefully) getting special treatment from deferential waiters and managers was way too tempting!

Now, several months later, my first ‘proper’ writing assignment has been released! May I present: Flavors of the Amazon: 

Hmmm, there seems to be a typo there – surely that should be FlavoUrs of the Amazon? Ho ho, just my little (British) joke.

The company that approached me (and many other bloggers around the world) is called Crimson Bamboo. They specialise in creating Travel Apps for the iPhone. The assignment was to create a themed eating tour of Rio, during which users would be taken to the best restaurants in the city. At each restaurant there would be a specific dish recommendation and also plenty of background on the restaurant, the ingredients, the dish and/or the local area. The final tour was to be sold on iTunes as an app for iPhones/iPads. Sounds like fun right?

Not only did I get to interview chefs and owners across the city, but I also got to indulge in some of the Amazon’s finest offerings. This cheeky little cocktail was just one of the gems that Mrs Eat Rio and I enjoyed discovering!

One of the best aspects of the assignment was that I got to call the shots – I chose the theme, the restaurants and the dishes. At the time I had just discovered a place in Rio that sold Tacacá (remember Anaesthetic soup?) and that gave me my idea. Amazonian food in Rio! I set off on a great adventure, snooping around Rio looking for restaurants and bars that sold food from the north, interviewing chefs, managers and waiters, asking a lot of questions about Amazonian ingredients and dishes and learning a little about food photography along the way.

The special treatment I had been hoping for didn’t manifest itself when the bill arrived (shucks!), but everyone I spoke to seemed really happy that I was taking an interest and after all, what manager/chef/owner doesn’t like the idea that their establishment is going to be recommended?

There are more than 20 of these food tours, spread across cities around the world. The Xiaolongbao (soup filled dumpling) tour of Shanghai makes me want to hop on the next plane to China!

My particular tour has 6 stops and, if your appetite is up to it, it can be done in a single day. It includes maps of the city, instructions on how to order and tips on how to get the most out of each eatery.

A handy aspect of these Apps is that you can download them onto your iPhone/iPad and then you can access them while offline – no need to maintain an expensive data connection while travelling!

The way it works is that you download the free Rama App and then you can select one or more of the tours that interest you for a dollar or two each. When I added up all the restaurant bills I accumulated during my research, I realised that I’d have to sell a lot of tours before I even break even (what can I say? I’m a glutton dedicated researcher). But I’ve already got so much out of this – I learned a lot about Amazonian cuisine and found that a lot of Brazilians themselves didn’t know much about the dishes from the north! Also I now have several chef friends dotted around the city and (best of all) I got to pretend I was a food writer for a month or two! It was a lot of fun.

Now I’m not going to beg you (I have my dignity! Well, kinda…), but if anyone is curious and decides to check out my Flavors of the Amazon tour, I’d love to hear what you think. And remember that there are a lot of other cool tours for cities all over the world: Buenos Aires, New York’s Chinatown, and (my favourite) the Xiaolongbao (soup filled dumpling) tour of Shanghai to name but a few. By the way, if (like me) you are allergic to Apple products, you may be interested to know that an Android version will be appearing shortly.

OK, so enough sales talk, just buy it already (Damn! I told myself I wouldn’t say that).

p.s. Do we still love and respect each other, even though I (kind of) just tried to sell you something? It’s not something I plan on doing very often and I have to say, mostly I just wanted to show off about the fact that I did a real-life writing assignment!