Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [137]
Dona Alaíde specializes in feijoada and a locally popular rabada (oxtail stew). Our group gets a couple of plates of both, preceded by a cup of a simple but sublime bean soup. Unlike the feijoada completa we had in Rio, this one arrives with the major components already in the bowl. To the brown beans, rice, and various meats in the mixture, you can add condiments at hand on the table, including a relish of chopped tomatoes and onions in a saucer and dendê-sautéed farofa in a shaker jar. The rabada differs from the feijoada mainly in the flavor of the meat because it’s served with the same beans and rice. Both dishes thrill us. They couldn’t be more elemental, and rustically Bahian, but Dona Alaíde cooks them to such perfection that they taste transcendent.
A few blocks away, Dona Juana displays a similar command of local foods. She hails from the countryside herself and makes that evident in many ways. She christened her restaurant Uauá in honor of the small village where she grew up, and decorated the pretty second-story space in a rural theme, with faux adobe walls, laced with sticks and straw, that display farm tools, pottery, old photos, and folk art. The menu offers country meats as well, ranging from roast goat to pig and sheep innards.
The four of us stick with specialties from the sea. Mary and Jan share a heaping plate of fried fish and shrimp on skewers, filled out more than amply on the side with steamed vegetables, rice flecked with corn, and a yucca mash that we like more than they do. Our choice is a moqueca de peixe, a hearty fish stew that we ladle over rice and sprinkle to taste with farina. It brims with chunks of firm white fish, possibly cod or haddock, simmered with dendê and a mixture of chopped onion, bell pepper, and tomato in coconut milk. Big windows directly behind us open over a small Pelourinho plaza, bringing in the sounds of the streets to complement the aromas and tastes of the table.
Going from excellent to extraordinary, we have our best meal at Sorriso da Dadá. The name comes from the chef-owner’s dazzling smile, depicted in a number of portraits on the walls. Aldacir dos Santos, who goes by Dadá, moved to Salvador from the Bahia interior at the age of fourteen to work as a domestic servant. She liked to cook, so she opened a restaurant in her backyard, Tempero da Dadá, where diners dodged the drying laundry and scratching chickens. Gaining fame for her food—and some attention, too, for the underwear she hung on the line—Dadá branched out, expanding to several locations, including the beach restaurant we enjoyed at lunch on Sunday and this intimate, white-tablecloth operation in Pelourinho.
The menu encompasses a broad spectrum of Bahian favorites. You can start with acarajés, fried or steamed in banana leaves, fish fritters made with fresh or salt cod, and chowders of shellfish or octopus. All of us choose crab in the form of casquinha de siri, which the kitchen prepares with a little coconut milk and leaves soupy enough to absorb a dusting of farofa. After a few squeezes of lime and small dollops of molho de pimenta, it becomes one of the best dishes of our entire trip.
Entrée options vary from carne de sol and beef tenderloin with cheese sauce to a variety of moquecas (crab, shrimp, fish, lobster, and crawfish) and ensopadas (the same kind of stew without the palm oil). Mary and Jan select shrimp with vatapá paste, a luscious mating of tastes and textures. The two of us go for moqueca de siri mole, soft-shell crab in an exceptionally rich and complex coconut-milk-and-dendê broth redolent