Rio's kilo restaurants
There are a lot of things about Rio that are very unfamiliar to me:
1) Language. Reading is fine, but when listening, I can't even pick out words, like I could in Spanish.
2) Constantly being on guard about safety. Thankfully, I have very helpful hosts at my B&B, who for example remind me to take of my watch if they see me leaving the house with it on.
Today, I had a new experience - a kilo restaurant! These are restaurants where you pay by the kilogram. It's actually pretty cool for a tourist, because you can try a lot of different foods, they're all labelled, and you can see what it is before choosing it. The system though, is completely novel to me, so I had to stand back and watch the other diners go through the motions before I proceeded!
At Catete Grill, you can see that I took broccoli rice, a pasteis (deep fried wonton) filled with cheese, fish, potato, nira (chive) salad, filet mignon which they cook to order, fava bean salad, two different fish casseroles, and sushi. Sao Paulo apparently has the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan, and so there is actually a lot of Japanese food around here (and supposedly even more in Sao Paulo). But as you can see, the sushi is unusual - I think one had salmon salad and sundried beef (??), another had salmon salad, and the third had shrimp and mayonnaise.
So you fill up your plate, and then give the paper ticket that they give you at the entrance to the person who weighs your food. Here, they put the sticker with the price on it, and then stamp it.
A waiter will also come by and get your drink order - I got mate. He will mark it on your ticket.
Not sure if you can go back for seconds and get weighed again (probably), but you can definitely go back for dessert. At this restaurant at least, the dessert is weighed by a different guy, since there's a different price for it.
This is a really unappetizing picture of my desserts, because I've already eaten part of the desserts, plus I only got slivers of each. I had pudim de leite (like flan, the one on the top), torta de coco, torta de serenata (the middle one, it was like hazelnut), and torta de noces (the one on the right, walnut).
When you're finished, you give your ticket to the cashier in the front, pay, and they will stamp the little stub at the bottom paid. You then give that stub to the person at the door. By the way, my meal was BRL$29.09, or US$13.15!
Interestingly, this is also the system they use in clubs. At the door, you get a similar paper ticket. You carry your ticket with you all night, and as you get drinks the bartender will mark your ticket. At the end of the night you pay the cover, and your drinks (tip included) all at once. They give you your stub that says paid, and then you give it to the bouncer at the door. If you lose your ticket, supposedly you get a really big bill!
