Cross-Cultural Thinking - Emily Roth

During our first week here in Brazil one of my fellow classmates, who is very enthusiastic about food and trying new foods, had a craving for Brazilian steak. He kept his eye out for an amazing steak place and one day when we took a different route back to our hotel we saw this nice steakhouse that our professor told us was very good. We decided to go there that night and try it out. We did not know what we were getting ourselves into and as soon as we walked through the door I felt out of place. The place, Ponteau, was very upscale and we were definitely under-dressed, the waiters swarmed us and took us to a table. We even had some other guys that are part of our group show up later with backpacks, I’m sure we were quite the sight for the locals in the restaurant. The “cultural moment” came after we got our drinks.

Once we got our drinks we sat there for a little while observing how the procedures to get food took place. We decided that the first thing to doing was to go up to what we called a salad bar but in America this bar would have been a very elaborate salad bar, if not a buffet. This bar had sushi, chicken, pasta, bread, salad, fruits, vegetables, and a variety of different sides. We loaded up our plates and then sat down, everything was pretty normal until we got swarmed with waiters who had giant slabs of meat cutting it off directly for you at your table. We didn’t know how to ask for something to alert that we had enough meat at the moment so we continued to get swarmed by waiters. I had never ate at a Brazilian steakhouse before so I was completely taken off guard by what was happening. I learned from others that in America there is a card you flip to alert the waiters that you have enough food at the moment. We of course knew minimal Portuguese so we were not able to ask for a card or ask what the signal was to alert that we had enough meat at that time. This was one of many clueless moments at restaurants here in Brazil. Many other restaurants weigh your plate and that is how they determine your bill. I like this idea because it makes you more conscious of the portions of food you are getting, it definitely kept us from eating as much. We found many foods that we wished we could take with us back to America. Some of our favorite foods and drinks included Guarana, Petit Geteau (a traditional chocolate cake with warm chocolate on the inside), calabresa pizza, papaya, bolo de madioca, suco de goiaba, tons of seafood, macaxeira, and many more. All in all, we definitely experienced an aspect of the culture through all the different restaurants we visited and learned a lot about the social norms in Recife.