Decided to do something different, off-beat, from our usual dose of museums and cultural events. We headed out on day two to visit…

The Aquário de São Paulo, Rua Huet Bacelar 407. Rather unassuming from the outside, albeit very blue, it turns out to be a rather massive indoor and outdoor aquarium, plus a bit of a zoo. The latter part was less interesting than the fishy part, for which, I give you a video of a bunch of strung together clips I took with my phone….

It was pouring rain by the time we finished, and the only restaurant on my list near to there (it’s quite a bit south of the city center), was a Spanish place only open at night. We resorted to Google again. And, Henry’s been wanting “beans”, Brazilian style…

… so when I spotted Restaurante Feijão de Corda, Av. Nazaré 400 (feijão means bean, and the de corda are a type of cowpea) about ten blocks away, we headed there.

Big space, and apparently at night they have live music.

This on every table was an encouraging sign.

Henry got his beans – these are the feijão de corda in a classic Brazilian preparation called tropeiro – with bits of bacon, sausage, fried onions, green onions, and farofa, the toasted coarse manioc flour that everyone puts on everything here. Delicious!

I got the pintado em molho de camarão – catfish in shrimp sauce – which turned out to be a huge portion (they offer everything in small and large portions, and this, the small, was enough for about three people). Delicious stewed steaks of catfish in a mild sauce accompanied by rice and pirão, which is a sort of glutinous porridge made from, you guessed it, manioc flour, in this case made with fish stock. Not a bad flavor, but I don’t get the texture. One of those things you have to grow up with.

Henry asked if they had a little side salad to go with his beans, and this behemoth showed up – the “small green salad”, it was bigger than the rest of our food combined. I hate to do it, but we sent it back – that one was clearly on the waitstaff who knew exactly what he was asking for and tried to slip a rather expensive ($10) dinner salad onto our check.

Overall, the food was pretty good – not wow good, but definitely a cut above average. Service was friendly, but quite pushy and the salad wasn’t the only attempt to get more onto our table, and at first they didn’t want to take the salad off the check, until pushed… on that basis, it’s just not a place I’d go back to. R$143, $34, 2050 pesos.

If it hadn’t been raining, we’d have taken a real walk through Parque Independencia, which was across the road – we looked in on it, but the paths were all mud, and so we skipped it. I headed back to the hotel, it being around 3pm, for some down time, and Henry went shopping.

A bit over a year ago, when we were headed here for the first time, I started putting together a little map of places to try while in São Paulo. It’s a big city for Japanese and Chinese cuisine, particularly the former, and this place, Shin-Zushi, Rua Afonso de Freitas 169, had just recently been named the best Japanese spot in the city. Obviously it went on the map. Also turned out to be a mere four blocks from our hotel. And, they had a selection of non-sushi dishes for Henry.

The full omakase menu looked to be way too much food for me, and included a lot of non-sushi stuff, which is all I really wanted to try, plus running almost R$300 per person ($75, 4300 pesos). So we turned to the menu.

Good gyoza. Not great gyoza. Hmmm… that’s kind of a first litmus test for me… I mean, dumplings.

Henry got the yakisoba, stir-fried noodles with vegetables and pork. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen yakisoba quite like this – it’s not obvious from the photo, but the vegetables and pork are over a mound of deep fried noodles. It’s literally like one big mass of crunchy noodles under there in a dome, like someone piled them into a wok full of hot oil, fried them crisp, and then turned them over. Kind of like a version of Chinese chow mein.

I got the tokujo sushi combo – the sushiman’s pick of the day (I have the feeling, looking at some online photos, that it doesn’t really change day to day, which belies the whole chef’s pick thing). No explanation of what fish is on it, in fact, service was very perfunctory and pretty inattentive. We kept having to flag down our waitress to get anything – menus were tossed on our table when we sat down, and at the almost 20 minute mark we were ready to walk out when we finally got someone to the table to take an order. All attention was being given to a few obvious regulars, and to Japanese customers. Back to the sushi – it was pretty good, but no more than that – the fish was fresh, but the rice was bland, and the pieces had a tendency to fall apart. It certainly wasn’t anything that made me want to come back and try more, or even order a few a la carte pieces extra in the moment. Even the miso soup with cockles that accompanied it was just kind of average. R$304, $73, 4360 pesos.

I’ve had better at neighborhood sushi bars in NYC, without even pimping for anywhere special. Even Buenos Aires has sushi bars these days that put up a better sushi selection than this. I know this place is no longer the elected “best Japanese” in the city in the last year or so, but it still seems to make it onto various lists near to the top, and if that’s as good as Japanese gets in São Paulo, I’m not impressed. I assume there’s better, and hopefully, a lot better.

Two places with good food and unimpressive service. Neither of which I’d go back to, mostly because of the service. Pretty fish. And thus ends Day 2.