On a Monday at 1 p.m., private equity investor Nargilla Rodrigues and her two colleagues bring a fourth co-worker to the Rotisseria Sírio Libanesa in Rio’s Largo do Machado neighborhood to initiate him to their weekly lunch ritual. An army of diners in business attire have packed the small restaurant and clump around the to-go counter. Rodrigues grabs a standing table and fires off an order of stuffed cabbage leaves, kafta and lentil rice like they are shares in a fire sale.

Erisvaldo Correia dos Santos dreamed of being a star. He saw himself as a humorist, a singer maybe, and most certainly an artist. But the scrabbling northeastern immigrant came in 2005 to Rio, the Brazilian city of dreams, with just 20 reais – about $9 – in his pocket and a family to feed. “When I came here, I was hard as a coconut,” dos Santos says, meaning he was hard-up for cash. Nothing a little self-deprecation and naughty jokes couldn’t make up for. Food and guilty pleasure have a long, intertwined history, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. In that vein, snickering Brazilians have long appropriated the verb comer ("to eat") to mean a more carnal type of consumption. Rosca, the word for “screw,” has been turned into something even more blush-worthy, referring to other, fleshier things that can be screwed, and is also used to refer to a nicely round doughnut.

Rio de Janeiro didn’t need to be told to host colorful outdoor fresh food markets. The feira is a carioca tradition, with wooden booths going up overnight at their weekly locales and filled with wares so standard any local could recite for you off his head what you can and can’t find there. But with a little kick from the tools of the digital age and a hipster-era recalibration of the local palate, the Rio feira has gotten a particularly nice new edition. Junta Local brings together local producers and budding chefs in a biweekly, rotating-location food-fest, often accompanied by live music.

If you go to Rio’s Café Lamas to see where leftist organizers met during Brazil’s military dictatorship, go to Majórica to eat steak where the city’s business and political elites gather today. Located on a residential street in Rio’s Flamengo neighborhood, the restaurant from the outside looks like a three-story house, but for the neon red cursive sign with its name. It was founded in 1963 by two brothers from the Spanish island of Majorca and is now owned by the daughter of one brother, together with 79-year-old Galician-born Ernesto Rodriguez, who worked his way up from being the restaurant’s janitor 50 years ago.

Comprising a city within a city made of housing complexes and self-built neighborhoods, the Maré favela complex in Rio’s North Zone packs 130,000-plus residents into the area between the Avenida Brasil highway and Guanabara Bay, just south of Rio’s International Airport.

If there is a word to describe the Laranjeiras (“Orange Trees”) neighborhood, it is “pleasant.” Agradável. Agreeable. As you walk up its main drag, Laranjeiras Street, you pass by the creamy yellow and white façade of the elegant 19th-century National Institute for the Education of the Deaf on your right. Soon, on your left, you could come across the youth orchestra Camerata Laranjeiras playing free concerts at the General Glicério fair. It’s measurably Rio’s most progressive neighborhood – in the 2012 mayoral election, it was the neighborhood that most favored human rights activists and opposition candidate Marcelo Freixo (48 percent of the neighborhood voted for him in the election against Mayor Eduardo Paes, whereas the city as a whole voted only 28 percent for Freixo). Follow the rising street to its top and you’ll find yourself at the tourist train, ready to go visit the Christ statue.

Cariocas are doubly lucky. They live in a city bursting with natural beauty even in its concrete corners, where wide red and waxy abricó-de-macaco flowers grow in crowded plazas and you’re liable to have an overly ripe and spikey jacá fruit fall on your head as you rush to an appointment. For many, Rio is vacation, beaches, forests and samba clubs – enough to satisfy the craving for a life more exotic.

Foreigners tend to see Rio as stretching from the Christ statue to the beachside neighborhoods, from Copacabana to São Conrado; the rest of the city just provides passage to the Atlantic. That’s a shame. Neighborhoods like Jacarepaguá, Madureira and Bangu have vibrant lives moving at a breathless pace and more intriguing locales than the typical postcard views of the city. Even those of us who have made our homes here can miss these charms. For example, it was only after three and a half years living in Rio that we saw for the first time Madureira’s Baile Charme, a hip hop/electronic music dance party where extraordinarily fashionable attendees do choreographed line dances, and which takes place under a highway overpass about an hour away from the beaches.

The quiet neighborhood where Makalo is located, right between Syntagma and Plaka, is home to some good restaurants (such as old-fashioned Paradosiako) and even to a strip of ethnic joints located on bustling Apollonos Street. Considering the area’s proximity to some of the biggest hotels in Athens and to the ultra-touristy Plaka, however, it’s rather surprising that not many visitors have caught on to the charms of Makalo, a local hangout with a fun vibe and great Greek-style cocktails.

For a country of Brazil’s size (pop. 190 million), the number of foreigners in the country is pretty miniscule. Less than 1 percent of the country’s residents are foreign-born; the top countries of origin for those foreigners are the U.S., Japan and Paraguay. (By comparison, about 13 percent of the U.S. population of 319 million is foreign-born.)

We hear it every time we bring up the V-word: “But it’s impossible to be a vegetarian in Rio!” Nonsense. Not only is it possible to eat an earthy diet here in Rio, it’s getting so trendy that carnivorous cariocas are increasingly forgoing their weekend churrasco (grilled meat on a stick) for the kaleidoscope of couve (collard greens), cogumelos (mushrooms), tofu and all of its soy brethren. (Remember: Brazil is a soy powerhouse, one reason why China surpassed the U.S. to become its largest trading partner.)

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The Praça da Bandeira, an area of Rio that until recent years was mostly known for prostitution and cheap inner-city housing, is rapidly changing. Lying in the shadow of the massive Maracanã Stadium – built for the 1950 World Cup and the planned location of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics – it is alive with new construction and pedestrian traffic, which are changing the tired face of this historical but underappreciated neighborhood. And sitting snugly in the midst of this new buzz is Aconchego Carioca, a restaurant and bar with one of the best beer menus in Rio.

Chat up the older residents of a Rio favela and you’re likely to start hearing romantic stories about Brazil’s northeast: those colorful cajú and mangaba fruit trees, the clear turquoise ocean, the folksy and upbeat forró music, chewy tapioca sandwiches and cakes. Brazilians call that saudades – a longing for something lost, which may or may not exist in the form one dreamily remembers it. These are the pleasant memories many northeastern immigrants hold amidst the urban hustle of crowded Rio de Janeiro, where a working-class Brazilian knows the beach exists but easily lives a hot two-hour bus ride away from it.

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