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In a city filled with Technicolor snack bars, Casa Paladino Comestíveis instead looks more like the kind of place where you’d find seedy men smoking cigars in a black-and-white film. Glass cases lining the walls display manila-labeled cachaça and Cuban rum bottles, with an occasional anachronism, like boxed Toddynho chocolate milk, breaking its turn-of-the-century salon aesthetic. Cloudy mirrors, a handwritten menu and a grape-adorned Bacchus sculpture decorate its black carved wooden walls.

Paladino prides itself on being more or less stuck in time since it opened in 1906. Ricardo Amaro, one of its owners, even claims that the hazy wooden wall clock – still functioning – has been hanging since then.

“Here, we don’t have a TV. There are people who want to have a beer and watch the news,” Amaro says, showing his obvious disinterest in doing such a thing. “That’s a little out of place for us.”

The deli-cum-package-store is on a gritty corner of Rio’s downtown, across Presidente Vargas Avenue from the city’s pirated electronics market, and is also an entry to Rio’s port zone. That area is Rio’s most historical; it functioned as the city center when Rio was a commercial port town through which hundreds of thousands of African slaves and the Portuguese royal court alike entered to establish Brazil as the economic powerhouse of the colonial empire and Rio its capital city. The region nowadays has the odd duality of being Rio’s most alive and most dead. The Presidente Vargas and intersecting Rio Branco avenues form the corner of working Rio, packed with jaywalking commuters during commercial hours and so empty on weekends that the only people to be seen are the homeless sleeping soundly on the sidewalks.

An omelet and sandwich at Casa Paladino Comestíveis, photo by Nadia SussmanPaladino is spot-on for the light snacker and heavy drinker; the menu has no dishes, only meaty sandwiches, omelets and cheese plates. House favorites are the bacalhau (salt cod) and shrimp omelets, though we recommend trying the gorgonzola with parsley and green onion. The trademark thickly piled salami and provolone sandwich is meant to accompany a beer or whiskey. In addition to its deli and salon dining area, Paladino has several packed corridors with imported liquors and 100 types of wine – including Brazilian ones for as cheap as $3 – and 2.5-liter champagne bottles. Amaro recommends the Chandon, Salton and Aurora vineyards for first-time tasters on the nascent Brazilian wine scene.

Take your snack and spirits alongside Paladino’s saloon-style doors and remember the rapidly changing city in which the shop sits squarely in the middle. With the World Cup this year and Olympics in 2016, the clock is ticking for Rio officials to put the smartest and most contemporary face on the city. The old is hastily making way for the new. For example, the Hotel Paris, an abandoned century-old architectural gem on the rowdy Praça Tiradentes long occupied by prostitutes and a famous sex-worker NGO, was recently purchased by French developers who say they will make it the neighborhood’s first five-star hotel. The city government is pushing for a cleanup of the port zone, but the area’s charming homes will soon be overshadowed by the commercial towers. In a panic over a possible shortage of hotel rooms for these impending events, the city is offering tax incentives to the cheap motels – frequented by sex workers and still-live-with-our-parents Brazilian couples – to convert their rooms into family-friendly accommodations.

Casa Paladino Comestíveis, photo by Nadia SussmanIn a city that clangs with the noise of obras (construction work) and reformas (rehabs), Paladino is a rarecantinho (hidden corner) in no rush to slow its aging.

 
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Nadia Sussman

Published on January 10, 2014

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