My husband has a nickname for me that I've always quietly loved.

He calls me the Bourdain of Brazil.

I never corrected him. Because somewhere underneath the flattery, I understood exactly what he meant — and I understood it because I recognized something of myself in Anthony Bourdain long before that nickname ever existed. Not the celebrity chef part, not the television part. The other part. The restless, insatiably curious, slightly obsessive hunger to understand a place not through its monuments or its museums only, but through its people, its smells, its noise, and most of all — its food.

Bourdain used to say that tastes and smells are his memories. I have never heard a more accurate description of how I experience the world. And I have never heard a more accurate description of Brazil.

There is a moment — and if you've been there, you know exactly the one I mean — when Brazil stops being a destination and starts being something else entirely. Something harder to name. A feeling that settles into your chest somewhere between your first cold chope and your first real roda de samba, when the music is coming from somewhere you can't quite locate and the person next to you is a complete stranger who is already treating you like family.

Bourdain felt it immediately. I know this not because I was there, but because I watched his face when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first time in 2003, filming A Cook's Tour — and I recognized the expression. It's the expression of someone who has just realized they were not prepared for what they walked into.

He called Rio "my kind of town." Music, culture, beaches, food — the whole intoxicating package delivered at once, without apology and without pause. The episode was called How to Be a Carioca, and I remember watching it as a Brazilian woman who was born and raised in exactly the city he was trying to understand — and feeling, for the first time, the very particular pride of watching someone genuinely fall in love with your home.

Not the postcard version. The real one.

Here is what I always admired about Bourdain as a traveler: he was allergic to performance. He had zero patience for the curated, the sanitized, or the tourist-facing version of any place. He wanted the raw, the unapologetic, the places that weren't trying to impress him — because those are always, without exception, the best ones.

In Rio, that instinct led him to exactly the right places.

He started at Confeitaria Colombo — our magnificent Belle Époque pastry shop in Centro, all gilded mirrors and Portuguese tiles — and in the most Bourdain way possible, immediately declared that this was no way to begin a trip to Rio. He wasn't wrong. Colombo is extraordinary and worth every minute of your time, but it was never going to be the heart of the city he was looking for. So he moved on.

To Ipanema beach, where a simple grilled pork sandwich from a beachside kiosk at Posto 9 gave him more satisfaction than the most elaborate restaurant could have. To Bar do Mineiro in Santa Teresa, where he ate carne seca with deep-fried manioc and pork crackling — real boteco food, honest and generous and exactly the kind of thing that makes you understand why Cariocas don't need much beyond a good table and someone they like sitting across from it.

And then to Niterói — the other side of the bay that most visitors never cross — to Mercado São Pedro, the fish market where the fishermen bring their catch directly to the stalls and the restaurants upstairs cook it on the spot. This is one of my own favorite recommendations for travelers, and seeing Bourdain gravitate toward it without any prompting felt like a small personal vindication.

But the moment that has stayed with me most from that first visit is not a restaurant at all. It is the feijoada.

Someone cooked it for him at home — a proper, traditional feijoada with, in his words, "all the right pieces." And he said something about it that I have thought about many times since: "Feijoada is the gravity that pulls the whole family inward." He understood it immediately — that this dish is not about the food. It is about the gathering. It is the excuse to stop, to sit, to stay for hours, to let the afternoon become evening and the evening become night and not feel the least bit guilty about any of it. Feijoada is an act of love disguised as lunch.

He also introduced his audience to the boteco — Brazil's great democratic institution — through Bracarense, a classic in Leblon that I still recommend to this day. His host was late, because in Rio, hosts are always late, and Bourdain sat at the counter and ordered codfish pastry and a cold beer and observed the rhythm of the place with the patience of someone who understood that being early in a country that runs on its own time is simply a failure of cultural imagination.

Because of course he did.

In 2012, No Reservations brought him back to Rio — and this time, one of the scenes that captures the city most perfectly is the simplest one imaginable. Bar Urca. A no-frills bar at the edge of the bay in the neighborhood of Urca, where the seawall serves as both bar counter and dining table, where you balance your beer in one hand and a petisco in the other, and the view in front of you is Guanabara Bay with Christ the Redeemer presiding over everything in the distance.

Fried sardines. Pastel de camarão. Bolinho de bacalhau. A rich seafood broth that you drink standing up, looking out at the water, with the sun going down behind the mountains.

No reservation required. No dress code. No performance.

Just Rio, being exactly what it is.

And this is the other thing Bourdain understood that many travelers miss entirely: Brazil is not a single experience. It is a continent pretending to be a country, with a different soul in every region, a different cuisine in every state, a different rhythm in every city.

He came back again and again — to São Paulo, where the food reflects a century of Italian, Japanese, and Lebanese immigration all layered on top of each other in one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities. To Bahia, the spiritual and cultural heartland of Afro-Brazilian identity, where the food is spiced and rich and inseparable from centuries of history. To Minas Gerais, the landlocked mountain state that produces Brazil's finest cheeses, most complex cachaças, and the kind of slow-cooked, wood-fire cuisine that makes you want to never leave the table.

He kept coming back because Brazil kept giving him more than he expected. That is its particular genius as a destination. Just when you think you understand it, it reveals another layer.

Bourdain once described what he was looking for in a place as "extreme emotions and experiences" — what he called a "delightfully debaucherous sensory stew." I love that phrase. I have probably used the sentiment a thousand times without the words.

Because this is exactly how I experience Brazil. Not as a series of attractions to check off a list, but as a full-body sensory immersion that starts from the moment the plane descends over Rio's mountains and coastline and doesn't end until long after you've gone home and found yourself, unexpectedly, missing the sound of samba coming through an open window at 2am.

The food is inseparable from the feeling. The boteco is inseparable from the social ritual. The feijoada is inseparable from the Saturday afternoon. The roda de samba is inseparable from the street it takes place on, the stranger who moves over to make room for you, the cold chope that appears in your hand before you've had time to ask for it.

You cannot experience any of it correctly from a distance. You have to be in it. You have to let your guard down — and then something extraordinary happens. The moment you stop performing "tourist" and start just being a curious human being in a city full of warm, generous, exuberant people, the city opens up completely.

I have watched this happen to friends I've hosted in Rio. I have watched it happen to people I barely knew. And every single time, I recognize the expression. It is the same one Bourdain had when he stepped off the plane for the first time.

They weren't prepared for what they walked into.

That moment — of pure, unguarded wonder — is what I am trying to give you. Not a list of restaurants. Not a safety briefing. Not a polished highlight reel. The actual experience of a place that gets under your skin and stays there.

The only real risk of coming to Brazil is falling in love and not wanting to leave.

I speak from experience. So did Tony.

Travel Guide Brazil begins in Rio de Janeiro — because Rio is where Brazil announces itself most loudly and most completely. But it doesn't end there. This is the first step of a longer road through a country that will surprise you every time you think you finally understand it.

If you are the kind of traveler who plans trips around the menu. Who chooses destinations based on what you might taste rather than what you might photograph. Who believes that the truest way to understand a culture is to sit down at its table, order what the locals order, and stay until the evening runs out — then you are exactly who I built this for.

Bourdain would have bought the guide.

I like to think he would have agreed with most of it.

Bem-vindos ao Brasil. Let's eat.

Michele is a proud Brazilian, a native Carioca, local travel consultant, and the founder of Travel Guide Brazil.

Her Rio de Janeiro Foodie Bundle — including the Essentials Guide, The Escapades, and the Foodie Master Spreadsheet — is the insider toolkit she wishes every traveler had before stepping off the plane.