On a balmy afternoon in Belém do Pará, a historic port near the mouth of the Amazon River in northern Brazil, I sat down for lunch in the creaky-floored dining room of Iacitata Amazônia Viva. Wooden doors opened onto a Juliet balcony, beyond which a low mantle of cloud mirrored the pewter-gray surface of Guajará Bay. Eager to sample the flavors that have, over the past decade or so, earned Belém a reputation as Brazil’s most interesting food city, I ordered the restaurant’s tasting menu.

Dish after dish arrived in glossy black cuia, traditional vessels made from dried tree gourds. There were shredded hearts of açaí palm and crisp morsels of fried water buffalo, half a million of which live on the immense Amazon Delta island of Marajó, where chef Tainá Marajoara traces her roots. My favorite was kanhapira: a medallion of filhote, or Amazonian catfish, in a sauce of fermented tucumã, a palm fruit. Even in Belém, kanhapira isn’t often served in restaurants—which is why Marajoara keeps it on her menu. “When people truly want to eat the food of the Amazon, they come here,” she says. “We want to keep our culture alive.”

Founded by the Portuguese in 1616, Belém is today home to 2.5 million people and serves as the capital of the state of Pará, which covers an area three times the size of California. Following the arrival of the Portuguese, cacao, rubber, Brazil nuts, and copaiba oil passed through Belém’s port en route to Europe and the rest of Brazil, though the Tupinambá peoples had been using the area as a trading post for far longer. 

On a steamy mid-morning stroll through Ver-o-Peso, Belém’s main market, I passed stalls piled with smoked and salted river fish from distant inland villages; bottles of amber-colored tucupi, a ferment of pressed manioc juice used as a base for soups and sauces; leaves of jambú, an herb that, when cooked, tastes like chlorophyll and stings like Szechuan peppercorn; and eggplant-purple açaí. In Pará, where 90 percent of the world’s açaí is grown, it’s eaten not as a dessert but instead ground into a dark, astringent pulp and served with fried fish. 

Like many ports, Belém also grew into an important hub for cultural exchange. Portuguese immigrants brought the roasted pork loin that today appears in a decadent breakfast sandwich at the classic downtown bakery A Bijou. The skewers of meat brushed with soy and roasted over coals on Belém’s streets arrived with Japanese migration to the region from the 1930s onward. Then there are street stalls like Barraca da Fafá, a 30-year-old institution in one of the crowded market lanes that lead inland from Ver-o-Peso. They specialize in the traditional dishes of Indigenous peoples from across the Amazon Basin, like maniçoba, an earthy, green-black stew made by boiling manioc leaves for a week to rid them of poisonous cyanide, then cooking them with smoked pork and sausage. 

For all their sophistication—transforming a poisonous root and its leaves into a whole range of delicacies is no mean feat—for years such dishes were seen by the city’s elite as the food of poverty. Thiago Castanho, a chef at Remanso do Peixe, said that until recently, “people were ashamed to eat farinha in a restaurant or to have their mouths stained purple from açaí.” Castanho’s father, Chicão, opened Remanso do Peixe in 2000 in his family’s home just outside Belém’s historic center. He began by serving neighbors the bubbling fish soups that have since earned the restaurant national renown—particularly the moqueca paraense, made with tucupi and filhote and finished with jambú. 

Pioneers like the late chef Paulo Martins started inviting cooks from around the country to visit Belém in the early 2000s, but the city’s culinary scene didn’t start to gain global renown until about 10 years ago, after Marajoara opened Iacitata and Castanho returned from stints cooking in São Paulo and Portugal. Since then, fine-dining restaurants like Santa Chicória, run by chefs Ilca Carmo and Paulo Anijar, have expanded the city’s culinary lexicon to include dishes like filhote and rice with jambú pesto and a crisp cassava gratin served with burrata from Marajó. At the cocktail bar Muamba, owner Yvens Penna brightens a classic margarita with homemade chicória soda crafted from a pungent local herb that tastes like cilantro on steroids.

Even Belém’s loveliest guesthouse, Cas’Amazonia Brasil, set in a stylishly updated early-1900s building, is connected to the food world. Opened in 2021 after an eight-year restoration, it is owned by Jô Alves and Fernanda Stefani, whose company 100% Amazonia exports ingredients responsibly sourced from local farmers. 

The recent recognition of Belém’s restaurant scene, says the local food influencer and self-taught culinary historian Marcos Medici, owes less to high-end dining rooms than to humbler places like Remanso do Peixe (which is still set in the Castanho family home) and the no-frills canteen Café Bolonha. 

Medici and I chatted there one afternoon over brisket braised with caramelized alliums and a classic bowl of tender duck leg braised in tucupi, decadent as any French confit. During the years when Belém’s elite refused to eat this kind of food outside of their homes, “traditional dishes,” Medici told me, “were preserved in the periphery.” 

Today, many of those dishes offer essential lessons in sustainability. In November, the United Nations held its 30th annual Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Belém—an acknowledgment of the Amazon’s power, and its fragility. Food is central to those conversations. As Marajoara puts it: “We have the ancestral technology to make food that mitigates the suffering of climate change. Forget ‘molecular gastronomy.’ That’s what we already do.”

On my last morning in town, I woke early and took a taxi to a neighborhood market called Feira da 25, where, at a 56-year-old stall called Tapioca da Dina, I devoured a breakfast of tapioca molhada: a delicate crêpe of manioc starch stuffed with shaved coconut and drenched in cool, sweet coconut milk. 

Afterward, Penna offered to drive me 40 minutes north to Icoaraci, at the edge of Belém’s metro area, for lunch at Restô da Villa Prime, which Medici had described to me as “an essential place.” Seated in chef Osvaldo Farias’s spacious, sunlit dining room, Penna, Medici, and I spooned a sweet flurry of shredded crab out of a bowl painted to resemble a crab shell. (It was made, I learned, in one of the many family-run ceramics workshops that line nearby Travessa da Soledade.) A steaming pot of caldeirada, or fish stewed in tucupi, followed, earthy and bright and, as Medici had promised, essential: a miraculous ingredient in its purest form. 

“What we try to do here is real Paraense food, traditional food, in the best way we can,” Farias told me after lunch. “There are still things that we can only find here,” he said. “For us that’s a source of pride.”