Street dance, a craft beer tour and a super sandwich – صحيفة الصوت

Hello readers! It’s been a while hasn’t it? Can you believe that at one point I was churning out between 4 and 5 blog posts a week? That’s about the number of posts I published in the entirety of 2017. Why the lack of posts? Well, it’s been a topsy-turvy 18 months and that kind of chaos doesn’t lend itself to writing upbeat, entertaining or informative blog posts (believe it or not, that’s what I aim for). So how come I’m back? Well, honestly, I’ve missed the writing and I’ve missed the interaction with you guys – Facebook and Instagram are all very well, but a blog feels less limited and less lazy. So here we go again!

Rather than dive straight into highfalutin articles on the state of politics in Brazil or analysis of some hot topic in current affairs, I thought I’d start out with something light and easy – a quick summary of some things I’ve seen in the last week. Let’s start off with this dance group who perform on the streets of Botafogo.

Street Dance

Kind of like a Brazilian Fame…

Craft Beer Tour

Back in September 2013 I took a group out on the first ever Eat Rio Food Tour. Since then my team and I have run over 600 tours and taken more than 4,000 guests out on the streets of Rio, eating, drinking and learning about Rio and Brazil along the way. We’re now the top-rated culinary tour experience in Rio and have been awarded TripAdvisor’s Certificate of Excellence every year since 2015.

This year we’ve started to introduce some new culinary experiences – first we added our evening bar food tour and then more recently we started a Brazilian wine and cheese tasting experience. Well now we are adding one more tour experience to our repertoire – a craft beer tour.

I have to tell you, doing the research and testing of this experience was really tough – my guides and I were extremely dedicated to the task, drinking dozens and dozens of beers and tasting countless snacks and meals in order to make sure that we got this right… More details coming soon to the ‘Food Tours’ section of the site (hic!).

Super Sandwich

Finally, I wanted to quickly tell you about a delicious sandwich I discovered recently. I’ve spoken in disparaging terms about Brazilian sandwiches in the past – the ‘sanduíche natural‘ really is a miserable creation – but there is sandwich hope, provided by one of my favourite new haunts, the awesome restaurant, bar, market and supplier called Marchezinho in Botafogo.

During the day they have an excellent lunch menu (which changes every couple of days), but the sandwich comes out at night (and not every night, so if you want to try this thing then keep an eye on their menu announcements on Facebook/Instagram). So here it is – the sanduíche de rabada, luscious oxtail sandwiched within a beautiful piece of focaccia:

The photo doesn’t really do it justice (my hands were shaking a little in anticipation and the lighting wasn’t perfect), but take it from me – this is one super sandwich.

OK, there’ll be lots of more updates coming, including news of a really interesting food conference that will be hosted in Rio from 23-27th July.

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