The first song on the first album of Brazilian music I ever owned was a samba called “Vatapá.” It was composed by Dorival Caymmi, one of the greatest songwriters of the pre–bossa nova era and a one-man chamber of commerce for his hometown, Salvador. Caymmi put to music his love of Salvador’s beaches and fishermen, its churches and candomblé houses, its festivals and its women and, not least, its food. “Vatapá,” in fact, is a singable, danceable recipe for the tangy purée of the same name. Start with the cornmeal, the samba instructs, and the palm oil. Find a Bahian woman who knows how to stir and how to shake her hips. Add cashews, hot pepper, peanuts, shrimp, grated coconut, salt, ginger, and onions. Put the pot on the fire, and don’t stop stirring, don’t stop shaking.
That was my introduction to Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, and 27 years later I still can’t think of a better one. Like New Orleans, Salvador is most famous for its food and its music, both of which have a distinctly African flavor. The city’s rich, spicy seafood dishes are so different from the barbecue and meat stews from elsewhere in Brazil that even other Brazilians consider them exotic. And the Bahians themselves are considered, if not exotic, the most festive and musical of their fellow countrymen. It was, in fact, freed slaves from Bahia who helped create the samba in the slums of Rio. Caymmi, now 91, was followed by a legion of Bahians—João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Daniela Mercury, Virgínia Rodrigues, Margareth Menezes, and Carlinhos Brown, to name just a few—who made so much of the best música popular brasileira of the last half century, from the bossa nova and the rock- and folk-inflected Tropicália to axé, which mixes samba with reggae, salsa, and other rhythms from Africa and the Caribbean.
Music is so integral to life in Bahia that you don’t have to go looking for it. The thump of the surdo, the samba bass drum, all but follows you around. It drifts from the street into the gilded nave of the 18th-century Igreja de São Francisco, gradually displacing a Gregorian chant. The twang of the one-string berimbau floats out the windows of the capoeira academies, where it sets the tempo for the dance-fight’s spinning kicks and cartwheels. Percussion bands like the all-female Didá pound out feverish sambas in the cobblestone streets of the heart of the Old City, Pelourinho. Singers and guitarists amble through the música popular canon at the bar-restaurant Cantina da Lua, where, for the price of a beer, you can sit at an outdoor table, listen to the music, and gaze at the polychrome façades and the Baroque, Rococo, and neoclassical churches of the Terreiro de Jesus, for my money the most beautiful square in South America.
But nowhere in Bahia are music and food more inseparable than in candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that runs through all levels of Bahian culture. The old West African spirits—orixás—are each summoned with their own drumbeats, chants, and songs and offered their favorite dishes. In the Mercado Modelo, Salvador’s big crafts market, stalls sell candomblé drums, statuettes of orixás, and other related articles. At one stall, a cheerful little man called Chocolate volunteers that my orixá is Ogum, the warrior spirit. (Every person is designated a son or daughter of one or more orixás, who reflect one’s true nature and set one’s path in life.) Chocolate says he can see Ogum in my manner, and he confirms his assessment by looking up my birth date in a candomblé book. At another stall, a man named José Carlos says just as confidently that I’m a son of Oxalá, the supreme spirit. What do I know? More important, what do they eat? According to a flyer provided by José Carlos, Oxalá likes coconut (good), Ogum cashews (excellent). There are no-nos as well. For instance, children of Oxalá should not drink cachaça, the Brazilian firewater.
I violate that rule right after leaving the market. At Paraíso Tropical, a restaurant in the hilly neighborhood of Cabula, I order a caipirinha, and on Oxalá’s day, Friday. There’s a plate of sugarcane sticks on the table, soon joined by a bowl of shrimp bisque and a serving of shredded crabmeat.
Paraíso Tropical’s rustic simplicity belies the fact that it serves highly sophisticated Bahian cuisine. Plastic tables and chairs line a narrow veranda with a red-tile roof overlooking a slope dense with mango, banana, and cacao trees. Down near the kitchen are coops of chickens and roosters that periodically raise a mighty racket. Then there’s the chatter of Beto Pimentel, the restaurant’s hyperactive owner. The moment I arrive with my Brazilian wife and in-laws, Beto launches into a monologue about having 23 children—22 of them male—and having been widowed four times. “She’s my next victim!” he crows, pointing to his current wife, a pretty, much younger woman (Beto is 61), who reacts with a small, forbearing smile.
For a stand-up comedian, Beto makes a great chef. He serves a version of Bahian food that is both lighter and more complex than most. Traditional Bahian moquecas (fish and seafood stews), cooked with tomatoes, onions, peppers, and generous amounts of coconut milk and the oil of the dendê palm nut, are too heavy for some first-time diners, and even Bahians won’t eat them every day. Beto dials back the standard ingredients and throws in others that not only add new flavors but also aid digestion: fruit pulp, orange and sweet-lime leaves, canary and citronella grasses, green cashews, hearts of palm fresh off the tree. Instead of large doses of oil, he uses the fruit of the dendê palm; instead of a torrent of coconut milk, the meat of green coconuts.
For main courses we order calapolvo (shrimp, lobster, and octopus casserole) and bobó de camarão (shrimp in manioc stew), and soon the table vibrates like a tuning fork. Brazilians express pleasure in their food with a musical “mmmmm” that sustains a single high note, like the one given to the orchestra at the start of a concert. My wife and in-laws are simultaneously eating and humming, like ventriloquists on The Ed Sullivan Show. The delicious calapolvo reveals a taste of blackberry here, a crunch of cashew there. The creamy bobó is, my wife declares, the best she’s had in a lifetime of eating it. The meal ends with Paraíso Tropical’s signature, a large platter of fresh fruit—papaya, guava, watermelon, star fruit, jackfruit, tangerines, tiny bananas, sweetsop—all grown organically on the adjacent slope or at Beto’s farm, outside Salvador. There are plastic bags to take home the excess fruit, to which Beto adds a big cacao. As we leave he offers to sell me a rooster.
Beto has opened a second Paraíso Tropical, which we visit a few days later. It’s down near the seaside hotels in the neighborhood of Rio Vermelho. This restaurant, which is run by Beto’s daughter, Carla, and her husband, has the same menu as the original but is stylish and quiet, with ochre walls, dark-wood tables, and soft recorded music substituting for the shrieks of fowl. The peixe ao Paraíso, a stew of fish and shrimp with Beto’s trademark pulps and spices, is sublime. We follow it with mousse of cupuaçu (a cacao-like fruit) in guava sauce, puréed frozen strawberries, and, of course, the monstrous platter of fruit. Before leaving, I ask a waiter named Charles if Beto really has 23 kids, 22 of them male, and was widowed four times. Charles pauses to think and then says carefully, “You can believe everything Mr. Beto says ... about food.”
Fortunately for me, Oxalá had the wisdom not to prohibit drinking beer. On Saturday night we head out to the working-class neighborhood of Garcia to have some lagers and listen to chorinhos—lively rondo-style tunes epitomized by the 1940s hit “Tico-Tico No Fubá,” which was recorded by everyone from the Andrews Sisters to Desi Arnaz. It’s after eleven, and we’ve just arrived at Aconchego da Zuzú (“Zuzú’s Shelter”), an open-air restaurant behind an unmarked garden wall. In the large patio, next to a mango tree, four men in folding chairs are playing, respectively, guitar, mandolin, tambourine, and cavaquinho (Brazilian ukulele). Zuzú herself—Juvência dos Santos Barroso—sits with friends at a table next to one wall, nursing a Skol beer. She’s a small black woman with hooded eyes, white hair pulled back in a tiny bun, and the demeanor of a kindly old rabbi. Her face is unlined, which is impressive considering that Zuzú is 98.
Her lifetime practically coincides with that of chorinho, which was developed in the last decade of the 19th century by musicians in Rio de Janeiro who melded European dance-hall music (especially polkas), the Portuguese fado, and Afro-Brazilian rhythms. We sit at a table next to Zuzú’s and order bottles of beer and, at her suggestion, a plate of deep-fried needlefish. The musicians begin to play the zippy “Brasileirinho,” and Zuzú nods to the beat. My wife asks her why she doesn’t get up and dance. “No, no, I’m a widow, and widows shouldn’t dance in public,” she says. But she admits that once she danced all night with a priest, who said it was okay—as long as she danced only with him. Near closing time, women from the audience take turns singing with the band. Zuzú presents her cheek for us to kiss her good-bye, and as we leave she turns her head back toward the music, smiling slightly, still nodding to the beat.
It’s well after midnight now, and teenagers are lining up outside the community center that serves as headquarters for Ilê Aiyê, one of the oldest and most prominent blocos afro in town. (Blocos afro are both carnival bands and organizations promoting education, community development, and black pride.) It’s located in Liberdade, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where the crumbling buildings put you in mind of Havana. On a stage at the far end of the center’s cavernous three-story entertainment hall, Ilê Aiyê blasts out a driving samba beat that makes Bruce Springsteen sound like Ray Conniff. Hundreds of young men and women dance and mill around. A little guy gestures to me to grab my wife the way he’s clutching his girl, and grins his approval when I do. At least half the young women in the hall are jaw-droppingly beautiful. The ones who really know how to samba are mesmerizing. Feet churning, hips shaking, they radiate joy and sensuality. The girls at the Ilê Aiyê show bring home the lyrics of Caymmi’s beloved “Samba da Minha Terra” (“Samba of My Land”), which declare that someone who doesn’t like samba is either “sick in the head or wrong in the feet.”
A wooden bowl of popcorn sits on the floor at the entrance to Sorriso da Dadá (“Dadá’s Smile”), a little restaurant on a narrow side street in Pelourinho. The popcorn is a candomblé cleanser, the hostess says, that protects against diseases borne by people passing by. The restaurant’s cozy front room has green wooden shutters open to the street, and bird-of-paradise on each of the six tables. Dadá is the city’s queen of traditional Bahian food, and my wife is prepared for traditionally casual service. Will the main courses take long, she asks, trying to determine how many appetizers to order. “You’re in Bahia,” the waiter snaps. “What’s the rush?” We come down to the speed limit and order carne de sol, chunks of sun-dried beef with sautéed onions.
For me, the most mouthwatering scenes in the film version of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands—Jorge Amado’s exuberant novel about love, sex, food, and music in Bahia—are not the ones of the young Sonia Braga without a stitch of clothing on, but rather the ones of Braga, dressed, making moqueca de siri mole, soft-shelled crab stew. The camera hovers hungrily over the pot as the crabs, tomatoes, onions, and peppers simmer in the bubbling coconut milk and palm oil. Dadá’s version of the dish tastes as good as Dona Flor’s looked, and it inspires diners to dreamy flights of hyperbole. I ask my wife which flavors stand out the most for her, and she says, “Happiness and peace.”
Happiness, if not peace, is the mood at Rock in Rio, a big club where the Sunday-night crowd of several hundred is as young as at the Ilê Aiyê show. We stand near the stage until the curtain rises on Estakazero, a band that plays forró, the music of Brazil’s arid northeast, which includes the state of Bahia. Forró is country music, but being Brazilian, it has a strong beat: Next to Estakazero’s singer-guitarist, accordionist, and triangle player stands a guy whacking a bass drum, the onomatopoeic zabumba. It’s jangly, infectious music, and Estakazero plays a high-octane version that appeals to the young, a salesman at a CD store tells us later. The worst new sound, he says with disgust, is the hybrid of forró and the lambada played by a band called Calcinha Preta (“Black Panties”).
Two nights later, on a stage at the top of the Largo do Pelourinho in the Old City, Grupo Everest backs up Aloísio do Cavaco as he sings pagode, a version of the samba that gives more emphasis to the cavaquinho. Aloísio is a natty gent of 77 dressed in white trousers, a long-sleeved teal shirt, and a Panama hat with a black brim. As he sings, he marches in place, waves his red ukulele, and points out toward the crowd spaced down the steep square. It is Tuesday, Ogum’s day, and the Old City is given over to the weekly musical celebration in which stages are set up on the Largo do Pelourinho and the Terreiro de Jesus, and bands perform free.
We end up at Axego, a little restaurant with a view of the square, and follow the music over bolinhos de bacalhau (deep-fried codfish balls) and the house specialty, carne de fumeiro (chunks of smoked pork served with manioc flour, chopped tomatoes, and onions). Down behind the stage, a pretty, slender young woman with café au lait skin is doing a private samba for her boyfriend, who watches admiringly and claps his hands to the band’s beat. Hips undulating, elbows out, she can’t seem to stop, and the grin on her guy’s face bespeaks all the promise of an evening that has just begun, with a woman who can move like that.
Most Tuesday nights, Olodum, the famed bloco afro that has recorded with Paul Simon and Michael Jackson, performs on its own covered stage in the nearby Largo de Teresa Batista, but this week the band is taking a break. Still, there’s no percussion deficit: Strolling along the Rua João de Deus, we’re jolted by spine-rattling drumbeats coming from a side street. Down in front of Sorriso da Dadá, a thick crowd surrounds a local band called Swing do Pelô. Its young members, their braided hair tied high on their heads, are dancing in a circle as they bang out a delirious samba on snare drums, over a bass drum that sounds like Godzilla’s heartbeat.
Now the band and the crowd begin moving, and we reluctantly drop away, knowing we have bags to pack. But the drums, the African pulse of Salvador, will stay in our ears and make us feel, for a long time after, saudade da Bahia—longing for Bahia—which is, of course, the title of the loveliest, most haunting song by Dorival Caymmi.
The Details
Staying There
The top-rated hotels are on or near the beach, on the southern side of the city. The Sofitel Salvador resort (800-763-4835; sofitel.com; from $134) has the virtue of being near the airport and the beach of Itapoã, but the drawback of being a 45-minute drive from the Old City. At the Pestana Bahia (011-55-71-21-03-80-00; pestana.com; from $95), in Rio Vermelho, closer to the Old City and the best restaurants, all rooms have ocean views and the sound of the surf to lull you to sleep. For that elusive elegant small hotel in the historic center, you won’t have to wait long; in October, Pousadas de Portugal will open Pousada Convento do Carmo (pousadasofportugal.com), a charming 16th-century Carmelite monastery converted to a 78-room hotel.
Eating There
Both of the Paraíso Tropical restaurants—in Cabula (98-B Rua Edgar Loureiro; 71-33-84-74-64) and Rio Vermelho (354 Rua Feira de Santana; 71-33-35-05-57)—serve excellent, relatively light Bahian cuisine. Sorriso da Dadá (05 Rua Frei Vicente; 71-33-21-96-42) offers more traditional Bahian dishes and has offshoots near the shore in Federação and Patamares. Also good is the venerable Bargaço (43 Rua Antônio Silva Coelho; 32-31-51-41), with a lovely garden setting in Boca do Rio. Yemanjá (Boca do Rio; 71-34-61-90-10) is highly regarded for its moqueca de camarão (shrimp stew) and is only steps from the beach. Finally, Cantina da Lua (2 Praça 15 de Novembro; 71-32-41-52-45) is a good place to nurse a drink, listen to live music, and take in the view of the Terreiro de Jesus—just stay away from the food.
Being There
For a general introduction to Bahia’s distinctive Afro-Brazilian culture, the Balé Folclórico da Bahia (49 Rua Gregório de Matos; 71-33-22-19-62), in Pelourinho, puts on a terrific one-hour show for about $8, with both candomblé and secular songs, percussion and dances, and some spectacularly acrobatic if not terribly authentic capoeira. Every Tuesday night, there’s free live music in the Largo do Pelourinho and the Terreiro de Jesus. Every other night of the week there’s live music somewhere in the city, especially in the Brazilian summer. Bambara (3186 Avenida Otávio Mangabeira, across from the beach; 71-33-42-04-81) is a large restaurant with ocean breezes, a dance floor, and a live band playing música popular brasileira.
Traffic in Salvador on weekdays is beastly, so don’t even think of renting a car. You can hire a driver (who might speak a bit of English) for about $60–$75 per day. The driver will ask for more; bargain. It also helps to rent a cellphone, which we did at the airport from a company called Vivo. The phone cost about $14 for the week; a 20-minute card, about $8. Most taxi drivers have cellphones and will pick you up wherever and whenever you want and charge you only the meter rate to your next destination.
To see what’s on (and where, and at what time) when you go, consult the indispensable website bahia-online.net, which provides voluminous information on all things Bahian, from history to restaurants to music to all the major candomblé houses. For help and advice from a human being, stop in at the Bahiatursa center in Pelourinho (12 Rua das Laranjeiras; 71-33-21-21-33), where the young staffers are cheerful and attentive. —C.H.