When they come into this shoebox of a pizzeria that still looks like the pé sujo (“dirty foot”) bar it previously was, clients often ask: But where’s Chico? That’s because they’re expecting Santa Teresa’s most beloved pizza chef to be a rotund and cherry-cheeked grandfatherly figure, perhaps in a red or green apron to make the point hit home. The toothy-grinning and somewhat lanky real Chico is instead someone who likes wearing running shoes to work so he can sprint out of his kitchen to greet the passersby on this cobblestone street for which he feels such affection he turned down a proposal to move to California. (More on that later. It involves Sylvester Stallone.)

Until a few years ago, breakfast eateries were not very common in Rio. Cariocas would have breakfast at home or at a bakery, while tourists had to make do with the always-boring "Continental breakfast" offered at hotels. But thankfully, everything has changed.

In the 1920s, Brazilian artists and writers published the Antropofagia Manifesto. They were unconvinced by the way the Brazilian elite – in a show of low national self-esteem – attempted to deferentially imitate European and U.S. culture. The writers instead proposed a “cultural cannibalism,” a “devouring” of imported cultural expressions that would be chewed up and “reelaborated with autonomy and converted into export products.”

racy Chang tells us what and where she ate when she was in Rio this summer during the World Cup. Chang headed up marketing and communications for Martín Berasategui at his three-star Michelin restaurant in San Sebastián, Spain, and, upon returning to Boston, she co-founded the pop-up Guchi’s Midnight Ramen and served as a teaching fellow with the Harvard Science and Cooking program. She is currently working on opening her own restaurant. Follow her adventures on Twitter and Instagram.

Well-intentioned food appreciators have often made the error of believing that touristy is the opposite of authentic. The same goes for tourism and cultural exploration in general. The relentless search for the most local anything becomes based not on how locals themselves regard this thing but on how many fellow outsiders like ourselves have found it. (The fewer, the better, so goes the logic.) The localness of the thing is inverted, with the outsider becoming the arbiter of what is “authentic.” But if we, the outsiders, put so much effort into finding what is local, what’s wrong with locals making a similar effort to reach out to us?

In a country the size of Brazil, you’ll have an easier time finding a carioca who’s been to Disney World than to the Amazon region, so cut off is it by vast forests and pricey airfares from the cosmopolitan southeastern cities of São Paulo and Rio. When we visited Manaus and took a days-long boat trip on the Rio Solimões, we introduced ourselves as American, living in Rio. Locals seemed uninterested in asking the usual litany of questions about America but grilled us on Rio, which they had only seen in evening telenovelas.

Editor’s note: This post is the third installment of “Best Bites of 2013,” a roundup of our top culinary experiences over the last year. Stay tuned for “Best Bites” from all of the cities Culinary Backstreets covers. Bar do Adão There are so many good fillings – 65, in fact – for the pastéis, or fried turnovers, at Bar do Adão that we appreciate their diminutive size, which allows us to eat a greater variety in one sitting.

With 4,500 miles of coastline, the world’s largest river by volume (the Amazon), more than 10,000 miles of waterways and the largest amount of fresh water on the planet, Brazil suffers from a certain gastronomical misperception. Yes, this is a country that loves beef, prominently on display in popular Brazilian churrascarias.