Today's Special - Free Water

In a recent article about São Paulo's upcoming Restaurant Week (even in Portuguese, the term Restaurant Week is used in Brazil) one of the city's major newspapers, Folha de S. Paulo, highlighted a special offerings available to customers at three restaurants during the weeklong celebration - free water.

For readers of Flavors of Brazil  familiar only with North American restaurant culture, the idea that tap water might be anything other than free at a restaurant might come as a bit of a shock. Most North American restaurants will either automatically fill a table's water glass without charge, or even if they offer purchasing mineral water will accede to a customer's request for tap water free of charge. In European restaurants bottled water is the norm, although in most cases a carafe of fresh water will be provided upon request.

In Brazil, however, restaurant water is universally bottled and is charged for just as any other drink - beer, wine, juice or soft drink. Free tap water is not offered, partly because the vast majority of Brazilian restaurant patrons don't trust the safety of tap water and wouldn't drink it if offered.

In most Brazilian urban centers water that comes from the tap is technically safe to drink although it's often not particularly tasty. City health departments and water departments make regular tests and publish the result. (Outside of metropolitan areas, tap water is often NOT safe to drink). However, most Brazilian urbanites do not drink tap water at home. They either rely on filtration systems or on purchased bottled water for drinking at home - so naturally they wouldn't expect to be served tap water at a restaurant.

The cost of restaurant bottled water is usually about the same as soft drinks, and it's offered either still (sem gaz in Portuguese) or sparkling (com gaz). At more upmarket restaurants there is also the option of purchasing imported water, such as Perrier or San Pellegrino, but these are very expensive due to import duties and are normally only seen in expense-account restaurants.

The three São Paulo restaurants mentioned in the article, Marcelino Pan y Vino, Oryza and Zeffiro, will forego the customary charge for water from March 05 to 18 as part of the Restaurant Week promotional event. Perhaps savvy Paulistanos will flock to them to take advantage of the opportunity to fill up on free H2O. The restaurants obviously hope so.

Living without a Hot Water Tap

If someone were to ask you what was the one feature of your kitchen that you just couldn't live without you might reply, "I have no idea." But if you really thought about it a good guess might be that it was running water - specifically hot and cold running water coming right out of the tap, or feeding the dishwasher, or even automatically filling the ice cube tray in your freezer. How could a modern kitchen operate without water - without water that's cold and without water that's hot?

One of the surprises that met me when I moved from Canada to Fortaleza, Brazil, a modern, relatively well-to-do, progressive city of about three million, was that the kitchen sink only had a single tap and  faucet. So did the bathroom sinks and the showers, and the washing machine, but this is a blog about food, so we'll leave that aside for now. There was no hot water tap and there was no cold water tap, there was just a tap, and what came out of it was water of a temperature that could best be described as tepid. This one-tap situation is almost universal in Fortaleza. It's not just in the favelas and small apartments that you find only one temperature of running water - in multi-million dollar and multi-thousand square feet penthouses on Beira-Mar, Fortaleza's oceanfront drive, there's still only one tap and one temperature of water.

Because the climate in this part of the world is relatively changeless in terms of temperature and because that temperature is hot (average daily high of 86F or 30C all year round), it's natural that the reservoirs that furnish municipal water here won't be pouring out ice-cold, barely-liquid water like the reservoirs that serve Vancouver, my previous home base. In Canada cold water means COLD, really COLD. Here, no.

At first, I thought that not having access to hot water from the tap would really change the way I cooked. In particular, I thought it would have a tremendous impact on how I cleaned up after cooking. Granted, not having a dishwashing machine for the first time in many years was a big change, but actually getting pots and pans, dishes, cutlery and glasses clean turned out not to be a problem. Because no one has hot water, it seems the dish detergents sold here are specifically formulated for tepid water, because they work very well, even on greasy pots and pans. Clean-up is a breeze.

For most other kitchen tasks, such as washing fruits and vegetables, I found that tap water worked just fine. In Canada, I used to have to mix cold and hot water to get water that I could stand plunging my hands in - here, it's not an issue. Water for use in cooking also creates no problems - straight out of the tap and onto the stove.

What turned out to be a more serious issue than the lack of hot water was the lack of cold water. Not for drinking, as the kitchen has a refrigerated water cooler, but for cooking. Some kitchen tasks require cold water - making pastry and shocking vegetables, just to name two. No longer can I just open the cold tap when I need to do one of these things. Having only tepid tap water means using ice cubes from the freezer to "create" cold water when I need it.

I've become so accustomed to one tap that I don't really even notice the lack of hot and cold water anymore. Expatriate life teaches one to be adaptable - if you're not adaptable you'll make a miserable expat. I just chock it up to one more thing that makes living away from one's native country all that much more of an adventure - a daily adventure.