Last Friday I had a new eating experience at a newly opened Brazilian restaurant in town. If you have never heard of or eaten at a churrascaria you should seek one out in your home town or maybe when you are on vacation.
The concept is fairly simple. The whole menu is all-you-can-eat and you have two main choices—just the salad bar (I think this restaurant tried to feature traditional Brazilian salad-bar-type dishes) or the salad bar and the meat.
At each seat is a circular paper disc that looks kind of like a coaster. One side is red and one side is green. When the green side was up these authentic gauchos (Brazilian cowboys … yee haw) came to the table with chunks of meat on skewers and sliced off a section. After I got some meat, I tried out my Portuguese and said “obrigado,” which means thank you. The gaucho looked at me like “yeah, nice attempt.”
When the red side of the disc was up that was a sign that you did not want a gaucho with meat on a stick to stop by at that time. Sue was sitting by me and soon after the meal began gave up using the red/green disc system. She resorted to grand gestures (it appeared some of the gauchos did not understand much English) and a loud voice. “Yoo-hoo, over here, I need some of that.” Funny.
The gauchos had many different kinds of meat—beef, lamb, pork and chicken—all cut and prepared uniquely. I would say there were about 12 different meat choices. By the end of the night I was satiated with protein. Too much MEAT! It kind of reminded me of an opposite experience I had at a Mennonite youth conference I attended in Winnipeg, Canada about 10 years ago. The food at the conference had little meat and what they did serve was not very good. During the week I ended up eating a lot of pasta and bread. By the end of the conference I had a terrible meat craving. Seriously, when I got home I just ate meat for a couple days. After my Brazilian meal on Friday, however, I did not even want to look at meat for a couple days.
I put some photos of Jeanette's and Mike's wedding on the post about that event. I think it was called "Kansas." I wanted to put some more on, but Blogger.com was having some technical difficulties. I will add a few more later so keep checking if you are interested.
2 comments:
oh my gosh! Do you remember that the WORST thing about the Winnipeg meal thing (aside from ALWAYS having sandwiches and having to go to the line that corresponded with your annoying bracelet's color and number) is that the drink for the meal was served in a DIXIE CUP?!?!? Whose dumb idea was that? Hm, I think I'll only have 3 oz. of water with my entire meal.
i need to go there! for a long time i didn't know where the heck it was. but it's by the movie theatre, right? in that building that looks like an orange peeling?
Post a Comment