Get set for food carnival

Lobster Bobo

His goal for the festival, he says, is not to be all about Rio but to showcase the breadth of the country's cuisine. So his packing includes pirarucu, an Amazon fish, on dry ice. There is air-dried beef from Brazil's northeast. ("It's not rock-hard and super salty like jerk beef", though the latter is also in his culinary bag of tricks.) There is coarse-ground cassava flour that will be cooked to a polenta-like consistency. There is pulp of acai, the healthful purple berry that's become trendy as the world's latest superfood.

There is also tucupi, fermented cassava juice, and therein lies a tale.

Angry yuca can be fatally poisonous, unless it's boiled for seven days straight to eliminate its hydrocyanic acid. (Happy yuca has the acid too, but not as much; even so, the tubers cannot be eaten raw.)

In a country of meat eaters - and in Brazil "meat" means beef, Nako espouses a nose-to-tail philosophy that avoids wasting any part of any animal. He says, however, that this is not really typical of his fellow citizens, whom he describes as not very adventurous eaters.

"We love our chicken hearts," he says, "but that's about as wild as we get."

Brazilian tradition is his repertoire, but he is always seeking different and informal approaches to classic recipes - quick to substitute ingredients when the precise item he wants isn't available.

Longtime fans of intestines and other offal, Nako and his colleague Tito Pal perk up when my Brazilian colleague suggests they might like to try such dishes at a local Chinese eatery. An hour later, they were wielding chopsticks in a hutong near Beijing's Gulou area, all smiles.