Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader who won a third term in office last year, said he rarely eats well abroad.
His apparently serious complaints about “palace food” abroad echoed the old joke: The food is terrible and the portions are too small.
“Everything is restricted. There isn’t a tray for you to choose and take what you want,” he said during an interview with a Brazilian journalist Tuesday. “Everything is very sophisticated, and, sometimes, we don’t even know what it is.”
He made the comments just a few days after returning from diplomatic visits to Italy, the Vatican and France for meetings with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and French President Emmanuel Macron, among other officials. The foreign ministries of France and Italy did not immediately respond to requests for comment early Wednesday.
But on this point, he may be catering to his people. Brazilian food is typically heartier and served in bigger portions than Western European food. French amuse-bouches and Italian antipasti are dwarfed by the typical Brazilian dish of beef, rice and beans. Brazilian barbecue restaurants known as churrascarias often serve all-you-can-eat grilled meats.
Lula, who has long sought to position himself as a man of the people, praised traditional Brazilian home cooking. “I can travel to the entire world, I can eat around the world, but when I come home, to eat a bit of [beans] with rice, a steak and two fried eggs, for me, it’s the best dish in the world.”
Lula said he wants more of this kind of food to be served to overseas leaders who visit Brazil. “There are days when the food isn’t good” even in Brazil, he allowed.
A good meal, he said, is a generous one. But the French are among those “people who eat little,” he said. He once joined other South American presidents to celebrate former Brazilian leader Fernando Henrique Cardoso, he recounted, and the French cook there made “tiny bits of food.”
“I can’t get used to it. I need quantity,” he said.
Brazil’s leader even made a list of dishes he would most enjoy eating, including oxtail, chicken with okra, and fried pork rib — perhaps in hopes that an enterprising overseas presidential chef would draw some inspiration from it.
Though the grub was not to his liking, Lula joked that he nonetheless returned home from his trip in one piece. “In any case, we survive.”
Rebecca Branford and Amar Nadhir contributed to this report.
