Restaurants

By Guy Dimond

I’m just back from Rio de Janeiro, and one of the biggest fleshpots in Brazil. But this one’s a restaurant. Called Porcão, it grills around 30 cuts of meat – and the procession of seared flesh just doesn’t stop coming. It’s a fixed-price, eat-all-you-can-place – called a ‘rodízio’ – but they don’t stint on quantity or quality.

A rapid succession of besuited waiters stop by our table, brandishing huge skewers of radiant yet mostly unfamiliar cuts, which they carve onto our plates using alarmingly sharp and long knives. My Portuguese is poor, but I’m sure the waiters are offering us the cut from the bit of the cow that wiggles when you scratch it under the ear. Or is it some tender zebra foals? Or today’s special, dolphin stuffed with ocelots. We try to eat a little of everything, and fail.

Porcão is Brazil’s finest example of the ‘churrascaria’ (Brazilian barbecue grill; this one established 1975), and the sheer abundance and quality of food is breathtaking. Even the buffet tables – where you can pick up starters and desserts – groan with an abundance and variety of beautiful food which is almost obscene.

Back to London, any Brazilian grill is bound to disappoint after the opulence of Porcão. There are a few in our city, most notably the small Rodizio Rico chain. And now this newcomer, Comida (meaning ‘food’).

Things start well: our friendly waitress is from São Paulo, and many of the other customers are Brazilian; it has a very casual feel. My caipirinha cocktail’s well-made, and service remarkably efficient by Brazilian standards (she is a Paulista, after all). Despite this, the place has the look of a fast food restaurant, and it lacks the fast-paced, exciting feel of the better churrascarias in Brazil.

The buffet’s a simple selection of the expected farofa (bland, toasted manioc flour), crisp manioc chips, and various so-what international salads; plus a vat of bean stew has been sitting so long it’s formed a skin. But then the meats arrive.

A cut of beef ‘like a filet mignon’, we’re told, is the high point, perfectly tender yet quite rare on the inside. Pork sausage is meat-packed, and strongly flavoured with herbs. But some other grills disappoint. A cut of pork is very fatty; chicken wrapped in bacon is undercooked and slightly pink. (We pointed this out to the waitress when she asked how everything was; yet the chef offered no apology.)

Soon, the same skewers we were offered on arrival are heading back our way again; I counted a dozen types of grill, one of them pineapple. The most exciting dish was the chicken hearts, which were packed with flavour, and not too tough.

We flip our coasters over from the green side to the red, to signify we’ve eaten enough and stop . Our enquiry about the types of dessert on offer brings out a big smile on our waiter. Comida serves ‘international’ desserts such as cheesecake, but ‘Brazilians don’t like to eat them,’ he confides.

It’s true that Brazilians like shapely backsides, but all-you-can-eat grills could really broaden those hips. Downstairs, there’s a bar – with Brazilian DJs at weekends – where you can work off some of those surplus calories.

Time Out London Issue 2010: February 26-March 4 2009