This weekend's meat
In my lifetime I have been fortunate enough to go to several churrascarias, Brazilian restaurants that serve a meat buffet called a rodizio.At a churrascaria one sits at a table armed with a small disk that is painted green on one side and red on the other. When he is ready to eat, the customer flips his disk from red to green and prepares for a carnal onslaught.
Seeing green, specially-trained waiters are deployed from the kitchen with mini broadswords skewered through with many different kinds of meat. Every five minutes someone will show up to one's table threatening to carve off a chunk of steak, lamb, sausage, chicken, or something else which once grazed, pecked, or lactated.
Turning the disk back to the red side indicates surrender.
In Brazilian communities of Boston and New York I ate at churrascarias that featured what is known to scientists as weird-ass meat. There were chicken hearts and turkey parts and liver in addition to the steak and lamb, etc. When I went to Brazil, I encountered even more elaborate set-ups.
This weekend I went to the Beverly Hills branch of Fogo de Chao, a restaurant I'd visited in Sao Paulo. The place was opulent, with a buffet that featured Brazilian favorites like yucca and plantains.
The meat, though excellent, was very limited. There was nothing crazy. No deer or boar or chicken hearts or Xiuxsia. I couldn't help feeling that in Beverly Hills they liked the idea of ethnic but not the reality of it.
With dinner I had a caipirinha, a drink I hadn't had since 1999. I remembered how good they were.
One major difference between the Beverly Hills churrascaria and everywhere else was the ridiculous parking situation that greeted us once we finished. It took an hour for the valets to return our cars. I've never waited half that long, even in Hollywood, which is stupid with bad valets.
The next night I went to a little place in North Hollywood called the Steak Joynt. I parked on the street. The owner greeted us personally, the dinner was similarly excellent, and the server bent over backwards to accommodate complex doggy bag demands.
The moral? Meat does not have to be murder.
I no longer normally eat that much meat, because I find the smell of fear too exhilarating. This was a special weekend.
posted
by Marty Barrett at Monday, June 19, 2006
1 Comments:
There was a time, long ago, when Sam enjoyed the delicate texture of a good rack of lamb, particularly on Sunday mornings after reading the funnies in the Daily Herald. His wife, Lucy, would take several days to prepare it and have it ready for her loving husband the following day. He doesn't enjoy it as much anymore. He prefers broccoli. Or soup. No, broccoli.
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