Eat Rio Food Tours!

I hinted recently that I had some big news to reveal. Well the time has come, here it is. There’s a new activity to add to your list of things to do in Rio: Eat Rio Food Tours!

Tell your friends!

The idea was hatched in a bar (naturally) many months ago. I was chatting with Diana, my US/Colombian friend who moved to Rio earlier this year. Diana is as food-obsessed as me, but she actually knows what she’s talking about! She has a degree in Restaurant Business and a Masters in Gastronomy (pretty fancy right?).

So there we were, discussing all our favourite Brazilian dishes and ingredients and lamenting the fact that so many visitors come to Rio but miss out on the best stuff. Well, we chatted away, drank some beers, ate some bolinhos and by the end of the night our plan was decided: we would take people out of the comfort zone of Ipanema, away from the mediocrity of Devassa and show them the best food in Rio!

Of course we were going to have to be selective – there are lots of great places to eat in Rio and we would need days to visit them all. So we started our research – we went from bar to restaurant to market to street vendor and we ate and drank at every opportunity (it was a tough job, but we were dedicated to our task).

Finally we decided on a route. I won’t tell you the details (wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise!), but in 3 hours it takes in some of Rio’s best eating establishments, gives people a great introduction to Brazilian cuisine and shows off some of Rio’s most interesting sights. Plus there’s music, cool graffiti and plenty of chit-chat along the way!

We think these tours are good for everyone. Tourists spend an afternoon discovering parts of Rio they might otherwise never have seen, they eat delicious food and they learn about many aspects of Brazil’s culinary traditions. At the same time we are bringing new clients to some of Rio’s most deserving small business owners.

Last weekend we took our first group of tourists on the inaugural tour and it was a huge success! One of our guests described the experience as “supernaturally good”!

So where do we go from here? In the coming weeks you will see a new page appear on the Eat Rio blog which will give more details of the Eat Rio Food Tours and how you can get involved. Currently we have a single route which runs every Sunday, but we are planning to expand and extend this to other days and other parts of town.

For those of you not interested in the tours, Eat Rio will continue as normal, with all my usual ideas for things to do in Rio and other cultural discoveries I make during my daily life in the Cidade Maravilhosa.

As mentioned above, we will soon have a new page here on the blog to promote the food tours, but in the meantime, if you would like to come on the Eat Rio Food Tours, or would like further details, contact us at: foodtours@eatrio.net. If you know someone who might be interested in going on a food tour, why not pass them our details?