Churrascaria Brazil Grill & Pizza

Meat, so much meat

Barbecue, Brazilian style, on Park Street
Hartford Advocate - Dining Out | June 29 - July 5, 2006

Sweet Jesus, I just ate enough food for three people, easy, maybe four. With Lisa unavailable, I had a solo lunch at Brazil Grill and Pizza in Hartford. I figured if I had to succumb to one of the deadly sins, gluttony was the least I could do to try and get an adequate sampling of the fare there.

Brazil Grill is a churrascaria, or a traditional Brazilian barbecue joint. A variety of meats are grilled over a fire on skewers and served in generous portions. Located as it is on a predominantly Brazilian stretch of Park Road, it's the place to go if you want to rub elbows with Hartford's Brazilian population.

Here's how it works at Brazil Grill. There’s a little nook with a steam table featuring pans of fried chicken, short ribs, okra with scallions, green beans with mild red peppers, a plain mix of carrots, cauliflower and broccoli, plain rice, vegetable rice, and red beans, A salad bar offered an interesting, vaguely bitter green salad of something like minced parsley or watercress tossed with tomatoes.

The guy behind the counter asks if you want beef, if you do, he pulls off a skewer of roast beef that's slowly been cooking over the fire and carefully slices off a thin sliver of the juicy beef. Sausages? Yes, definitely. He removes a skewer loaded up with fat sausages - so fat that they're starting to split the casings, and if not, the barbecue guy deftly draws the blade of his long knife across one of the sausages. With a pair of tongs he placed a sausage or two on top of the imposing pile of food on my plate. Then he asked if I wanted chicken. "Want" - that was the word. I definitely didn't "need" any chicken, but this was all about desires, not necessities. So out came the skewer of chicken chunks wrapped in bacon. Then my plate goes on the scale and is weighed up.

It's around $5 a pound for the food from the steam table and salad bar, and $9 a pound if you add a barbecue. I've always been a fan of places that charge by the pound. It serves as a memento mori when you see the scales - yep, I just ate two pounds of bulk meats, thank you very much. Plus it's generally pretty cheap that way.

The dominant seasoning at Brazil Grill is, drum roll, salt. They pile it on pretty aggressively. I'm not complaining though.

There's a simple beauty and wisdom to seasoning meats that way. Well, that's how they do it at Brazil Grill - you'd be wrong to expect fiery chili-fueled cuisine. As the grill guy worked the grill he'd reach with his free hand into a bucked and cast a sprinkling of salt over everything.

All of the meats were excellent (and salty). Despite the steady time over the flames, nothing had dried out. The beef dripped juice onto my plate as it was sliced. The bacon-wrapped chicken retained its tenderness. The sausage remained plump and pliant.

One could eat pretty heartily by just sticking to the steam tables, but I can't see going to Brazil Grill without sampling the barbecue. Though, I'm curious about how the Brazilians do pizza.

On the way out I grabbed an inherently sweet coconut cookie. It was so powerfully concentratedly sugary that the cookie almost stung my tongue. Salt and sugar, the Brazilians let the basics do the talking. It was a perfect cap to a workout of a meal.