Brazil bars compete for best snack prize

Gastro festival focuses on great bar food: best starter, coldest drinks, tidiest restaurant judged.

Brazil’s third largest city Belo Horizonte has begin the final round of Comida di Buteco, the great gastronomic festival that each year elects the best botequim– or local bar. The festival has grown in popularity over the 11 years since it launched and now and 15 other Brazilian cities now hold their own version, including Rio de Janeiro and Salvador.

The importance and the enormous popularity of the Comida di Buteco has its roots in the Brazilian tradition of botequins, an almost untranslatable word describing a small bar, or tavern.

Botequins are a favourite meeting point for rich and poor alike, over rustic and tasty dishes made from simple ingredients washed down with cold draught beer (chopinho). The botequim is like an extension of the living room, and Belo Horizonte has a particularly proud tradition of these.

As the capital of the mountainous, inland state of Minas Gerais, it is affectionately said of Belo Horizonte that “não tem mar, mas tem bar” – or, “it has no sea, but it has bars”. What’s more, the state of Minas Gerais has given Brazil some of its best-loved specialties, particularly pão de queijo (bread rolls baked with cheese), cachaça and many types of cheese.

Started in 1999 to reward the best dish offered in Belo Horizonte’s botequins, the Comida di Butecohas become one of the most important culinary competitions in Brazil and in 2008 it was included in the prestigious Guia 4 Rodas, Brazil’s answer to the Michelin Guide.

Today the Comida di Buteco attracts a great number of people: the event is organized simultaneously in 15 cities and 8 Brazilian states. In Belo Horizonte, the estimated public participation is of about 800,000 people per year, with more than 160,000 votes casted for the competing boutequins.

The event will end on May, 15th, with the Saideira festival, which traditionally marks the end of the competition with the announcement of the winners and has become one of the most eagerly awaited events in the Belo Horizonte calendar: almost 27,000 botequeiros (botequim owners) are expected in the city during the days of the event.

The Comida di Buteco awards the categories of best starter, coldest drinks, tidiest restaurant and best dishes presentation. To win, a botequim must get the most votes by the committee of judges and by the people, which have the same weight (50-50).

The counting of votes is held by the Statistics Institute Vox Populi, which uses evaluation criteria of quality and not quantity. That is to say that the victory does not depend on the number of voters, but on the arithmetic average of the valid votes cast.

Valere Tjolle
Valere Tjolle is editor of the Sustainable Tourism Report Suite

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