Art, music and serendipity in Old Rio
Following decades of decline, the one-time centre of Brazil’s public life has sprung back as a cultural and culinary hub
As Rio de Janeiro undergoes a facelift in preparation for next year’s soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, what was old is new again.
Miles from the future Olympic Village, the refurbished Maracana stadium and the new subway stops have turned streets in Ipanema and Leblon into construction sites. And Rio’s old downtown, the centre of Brazil’s public life for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, has sprung back over the past decade or so as an entertainment and culture hub.
The resurgence goes beyond Lapa, a once disreputable district on the outskirts of downtown. Anytime I’m in the city that was once Brazil’s capital, I find myself gravitating to a corner of downtown less frenetic and offering a greater variety of attractions: Rio Antigo, or Old Rio, wedged between the former docks and Rua 1 de Março in one direction and Avenida Presidente Vargas and Praça XV de Novembro, on the other.
Day or night, activity in the neighbourhood centres on the quaint Rua do Ouvidor, which is lined with attractive open-air restaurants, art galleries, bookstores and shops selling everything from antiques to custommade Panama hats.
On a Saturday afternoon in July, at the height of the Brazilian winter, the street is crowded with Rio residents lunching al fresco as groups of musicians stroll from table to table, singing and playing samba and chorinho, a precursor of the samba.
Chorinho was developed in the19th century, so it seems highly appropriate to see it played on a street with a past. Its heyday came when Rio was the somewhat scruffy seat of an empire ruled by Pedro II. In her book, A Parisian in Brazil, an account of life in Rio in the 1850s, Adèle ToussaintSamson remarked on the profusion of milliners, hairdressers, florists and pastry shops “displayed in all their splendour” along the Rua do Ouvidor, and took special note of the street’s leisure-loving denizens.
“It is the daily rendezvous of the ‘young men about town,’ who, under the pretext of buying some cigars or cravats, come to flirt with the French women, on whom they dote,” she wrote. “This street, although narrow and ugly, is in some respects the Boulevard des Italiens of the capital of Brazil.” It’s a reference to a street that was then the centre of café society in Paris. It was, she said, “essentially a French street.”
In my case, I began to frequent Rio Antigo about 10 years ago, when a restaurant called Cais do Oriente, or Docks of the Orient, which had opened on the Rua Visconde de Itaboraí a couple of years before, began offering live jazz performances featuring top-flight Brazilian musicians.
Cais do Oriente eventually stopped featuring jazz on a regular basis, but I kept going back to the area, in large part because I had by then discovered museums such as the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, housed in an imposing neo-Classical building that used to be the headquarters of the central bank. The centre opened in 1989. This summer, a show called Elles: Women Artists in the Pompidou Centre Collection was just wrapping up, and on previous visits I’d seen a large multimedia installation of work by Laurie Anderson, an M.C. Escher show and a selection of French Impressionist paintings.
More than once, I’ve found myself spending nearly the entire day at the CCBB, as it’s known. After checking out the exhibitions, I’ll browse in the ground-floor bookstore, have a snack in the café, sit and read for a while in the imposing atrium, then spend the evening seeing a movie or attending a play or concert: in addition to its many galleries, the centre has two cinemas and three theatres.
Down the block, is the Postal Ser- vice Cultural Centre, which seems to specialize in the visual arts. My favourite exhibition there in recent years was an interactive display devoted to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. The museum often features shows by Brazilian and European painters, photographers, sculptors and designers. On the ground floor, there is a quiet bistro and a theatre for musical and theatrical performances in the evening. If you’re looking for an authentic culinary experience after a museum stop, I’d recommend the Rio Minho, at Rua do Ouvidor 10, down by the docks. Opened in 1884, it claims to be the oldest continually operating restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, and I believe it. On one wall is a photograph of a luncheon the restaurant hosted at the turn of the 20th century for a group of notables, one of whom I recognized as my wife’s great-grandfather. The real attraction here is not so much the Portuguese atmosphere, as it is a dish invented at the restaurant: Sopa Leao Veloso.
It’s a tasty Brazilian bouillabaisse, teeming with fish and crustaceans, and flavoured with cilantro, pepper and white wine. Rio Minho doesn’t offer al fresco service, but many of the other restaurants in the area do, and the variety of choices is impressive. In a one-block stretch, I noted various Brazilian regional cuisines, as well as restaurants specializing in Arab, sushi and seafood dishes. Along the cobblestoned Travessa do Comercio, there are also several “por quilo” restaurants. These are found all over Brazil. In them, you pay for your food by its weight. These are especially popular during the work week with employees of the nearby Rio stock exchange and other businesses. The Travessa do Comercio terminates at the Arco do Teles, an archway dating to the 18th century. Born in Portugal, Carmen Miranda, the singer and actress who was Hollywood’s top female box office attraction in the 1940s, spent her early years in the shadow of the Arco, in a boarding house her mother ran at Travessa do Comercio 13. On the other side of the Teles archway, at Largo do Paco 38, is the historic Tabacaria Africana. Although I’m not a smoker, I make a point of always paying it a visit. In operation since1846, the shop boasts a clientele that has included presidents of Brazil, and, in its earliest days, Emperor Pedro II.
Customers can sit at tables in the front and puff away on cigars and pipes. In the back, glass jars gleam with a variety of sweet-smelling tobaccos from various corners of the world. If you ask, the staff will concoct a blend just for you.
The tobacco shop fronts on the historic Praça XV de Novembro, which takes its name from the uprising on Nov. 15, 1889, that deposed Pedro II and made Brazil a republic.
Later, I headed for the Livraria Arlequim on the ground floor, a bookstore noted for its fine collection of DVDs and CDs of Brazilian films and music, only to find that I couldn’t get near the bookshelves because a jazz quintet led by the Brazilian harmonica player Mauricio Einhorn was doing a free show and had drawn a big crowd.
I settled in to enjoy the music. That’s Rio Antigo: no matter what the hour, you never know what’s around the corner. The New York Times