In São Paulo, Brazilian Cuisine Is Back on the Table
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The back garden area is decorated with tropical plants, a burbling brook, terra-cotta planters and the like. With earthy colors and antiqued brick, it’s the kind of place you might expect to find in the city’s historic center, if São Paulo’s wasn’t such a mess.
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São Paulo’s Culinary Roots
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São Paulo, Brazil To my taste, the food is a half-step below Brasil a Gosto’s, but that’s still high praise, and its Combo Brazil tasting menu is reason enough to make a trip: it’s a great deal at 100 reais, and it doesn’t follow the oppressive tasting menu requirement that everyone at the table has to buy in.
The dishes that make up the menu are a parade of recipes both traditional and creative. The tapioca is crescent shaped and meant to be topped with accompanying slices of marinated abobora squash. There’s carne-de-sol, a relative of beef jerky, served with mashed squash and cumin; and a pirarucu dish that was no match for Brasil a Gosto’s version.
A highlight is the barreado, a long-simmering beef stew mixed before your eyes with powdery manioc flour that adds substance. The barreado is a dish that Ms. Salles pulled out of relative regional obscurity from the southern state of Paraná.
For dessert, the passion fruit compote — often too sweet for my taste — is given a nudge toward the savory with a mousseline of pequi, a nonsweet fruit from the cerrado most often used to flavor rice.
That we’ve gotten this far without mentioning the pork-and-bean stew known around the world as the Brazilian national dish is a tribute to how far Brazilian cuisine has come. But feasting on feijoada is a Saturday tradition, and the all-you-can eat feast at Baby Beef Rubaiyat (Alameda Santos, 86, and other locations; 55-11-3170-5100; www.rubaiyat.com.br) is a great place to get acquainted. That’s because the combination of their feijoada, salad bar, roasted meats and desserts combines the best of two great worlds: fine dining and all-out gorging.
Instead of cooking everything together in a huge pot, Rubaiyat serves its feijoada buffet style. The beans (and much of the meat) come from the restaurant’s own ranch, and you add only the pig parts you wish: two kinds of ribs (smoked and salted), two kinds of sausage (linguiça and paio), javali (wild boar) and more. The restaurant even separates the more adventurous selections from the pig — knuckle, tongue, tail and ear, all essential for traditionalists — into a love-it-or-leave-it section.
There are other kinds of meats available right off the grill, but they are hardly needed, especially with such a plentiful dessert buffet: yolk-crazy quindim (a baked custard), passion fruit mousse, doce de leite (a creamier cousin of caramel), plus a chocolate creation that may be one of the richest you’ll ever find.
Could it be fudge? Frosting? Brownie batter? Whatever it is, there is no diet on earth — anti-sugar, anti-calorie, anti-fat, anti-stomachache — that permits it. Its appropriate name: nêmesis. (The meal, with a drink, cost 79 reais each.)
That’s about the cost of an entree at Alex Atala’s D.O.M. (Rua Barão de Capanema, 549; 55-11-3088-0761; www.domrestaurante.com.br), which stands for Dominus Optimo Maximo, signifying Mr. Atala’s desire to have the “home” of the “best” “and greatest” cooking. D.O.M., which is the most famous restaurant in Brazil, lies beyond oversized doors in the same chic Jardins neighborhood as Brasil a Gosto.
It is fancy but not regal, warm but not intimate. It could be, based just on looks, a slightly stuffy French restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The service, attentive to what some would consider a fault, includes greetings from everyone, pushing your chair in under you when you’re seated, that kind of thing.
The staff is knowledgeable and bilingual, and perfectly happy to call over the sommelier even though you’re just deciding between the two cheapest bottles of wine on the menu (Brazilian whites, at 40 reais; only a handful of other bottles are under 150 reais).
The crowd is a Venn diagram section of the elite and the foodies. It is expensive in a way that puts it out of reach of most Brazilians. I may have been the first person in São Paulo history to receive a confirmation call from D.O.M. while riding squashed in a crowded public bus. (Sixty-five reais, the cost of the cheapest menu item during my visit, a risotto, gets you 28 bus rides.)
At least you get what you pay for. Restaurant lovers will recognize that they are in the hands of experts, a combination of production perfection and creativity.
It is perhaps a cliché to combine foie gras with local ingredients that have never been near a fattened goose liver, but it still creates an impression: first on the starters list was foie gras with, among other things, cambuci sorbet. Cambuci is one of those fruits so rare that even my geeky English-Portuguese fruit list that tells me that fruta-do-conde is sweetsop and pitanga is Surinam cherry doesn’t include it. But I don’t do 80-reais appetizers, so I went with the scallops in coconut milk with a slice of crispy mango, for a mere 50.
It was beautiful, but my friend Carolina’s salad (58 reais) was much prettier. It had thin, cozily curved slices of abobrinha squash dotted with tiny flower petals; crayfish hiding out underneath, and an extended ellipsis of pastel-orange passion fruit dots serving as an underline. It’s one of those eat-it-or-stare-at-it-moments, which I usually resolve by playing food blogger and taking a picture, irritating other diners with my flash, but capturing a shot that could be a screensaver.
Entrees were another blow-out success. Carolina, again proving her ordering prowess, got the baby pork ribs and forbidden rice with catupiry (73 reais). Forbidden rice, a purple-black heirloom strain that is not native to Brazil, worked fantastically with the catupiry, a creamy cheese that is a sort of national spread that goes in or on everything from fried appetizers to pizza. And the ribs managed to be in the zone where falling off the bone meets slightly crispy. It was, and I’ve never said this before, a rib I will remember a long time.
You can order desserts like cagaita sorbet — another fruit not even on my list — or you could just wait for the outrageous tray of sweets that comes with your espresso. They include Dadinho candies, little cubes of sugary peanut paste that were lost on me, but that anyone who was a child in Brazil in the last three or four decades will recognize. Just imagine Pop Rocks served at Le Cirque.
Since my visit, Mr. Atala has changed the menu, hand signing every one with a declaration that captures the changing nature of the city’s cuisine: “D.O.M. takes on its original vocation: to be Brazilian. I thus renounce the use of foie gras and truffles."
Sign in to Recommend
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Single Page
Reprints
ShareClose
LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkPublished: May 17, 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
The back garden area is decorated with tropical plants, a burbling brook, terra-cotta planters and the like. With earthy colors and antiqued brick, it’s the kind of place you might expect to find in the city’s historic center, if São Paulo’s wasn’t such a mess.
Skip to next paragraph
Sao Paulo Travel Guide
Where to Stay
Where to Eat
What to Do
Go to the Sao Paulo Travel Guide »
Multimedia
Slide Show
São Paulo’s Culinary Roots
Map
São Paulo, Brazil To my taste, the food is a half-step below Brasil a Gosto’s, but that’s still high praise, and its Combo Brazil tasting menu is reason enough to make a trip: it’s a great deal at 100 reais, and it doesn’t follow the oppressive tasting menu requirement that everyone at the table has to buy in.
The dishes that make up the menu are a parade of recipes both traditional and creative. The tapioca is crescent shaped and meant to be topped with accompanying slices of marinated abobora squash. There’s carne-de-sol, a relative of beef jerky, served with mashed squash and cumin; and a pirarucu dish that was no match for Brasil a Gosto’s version.
A highlight is the barreado, a long-simmering beef stew mixed before your eyes with powdery manioc flour that adds substance. The barreado is a dish that Ms. Salles pulled out of relative regional obscurity from the southern state of Paraná.
For dessert, the passion fruit compote — often too sweet for my taste — is given a nudge toward the savory with a mousseline of pequi, a nonsweet fruit from the cerrado most often used to flavor rice.
That we’ve gotten this far without mentioning the pork-and-bean stew known around the world as the Brazilian national dish is a tribute to how far Brazilian cuisine has come. But feasting on feijoada is a Saturday tradition, and the all-you-can eat feast at Baby Beef Rubaiyat (Alameda Santos, 86, and other locations; 55-11-3170-5100; www.rubaiyat.com.br) is a great place to get acquainted. That’s because the combination of their feijoada, salad bar, roasted meats and desserts combines the best of two great worlds: fine dining and all-out gorging.
Instead of cooking everything together in a huge pot, Rubaiyat serves its feijoada buffet style. The beans (and much of the meat) come from the restaurant’s own ranch, and you add only the pig parts you wish: two kinds of ribs (smoked and salted), two kinds of sausage (linguiça and paio), javali (wild boar) and more. The restaurant even separates the more adventurous selections from the pig — knuckle, tongue, tail and ear, all essential for traditionalists — into a love-it-or-leave-it section.
There are other kinds of meats available right off the grill, but they are hardly needed, especially with such a plentiful dessert buffet: yolk-crazy quindim (a baked custard), passion fruit mousse, doce de leite (a creamier cousin of caramel), plus a chocolate creation that may be one of the richest you’ll ever find.
Could it be fudge? Frosting? Brownie batter? Whatever it is, there is no diet on earth — anti-sugar, anti-calorie, anti-fat, anti-stomachache — that permits it. Its appropriate name: nêmesis. (The meal, with a drink, cost 79 reais each.)
That’s about the cost of an entree at Alex Atala’s D.O.M. (Rua Barão de Capanema, 549; 55-11-3088-0761; www.domrestaurante.com.br), which stands for Dominus Optimo Maximo, signifying Mr. Atala’s desire to have the “home” of the “best” “and greatest” cooking. D.O.M., which is the most famous restaurant in Brazil, lies beyond oversized doors in the same chic Jardins neighborhood as Brasil a Gosto.
It is fancy but not regal, warm but not intimate. It could be, based just on looks, a slightly stuffy French restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The service, attentive to what some would consider a fault, includes greetings from everyone, pushing your chair in under you when you’re seated, that kind of thing.
The staff is knowledgeable and bilingual, and perfectly happy to call over the sommelier even though you’re just deciding between the two cheapest bottles of wine on the menu (Brazilian whites, at 40 reais; only a handful of other bottles are under 150 reais).
The crowd is a Venn diagram section of the elite and the foodies. It is expensive in a way that puts it out of reach of most Brazilians. I may have been the first person in São Paulo history to receive a confirmation call from D.O.M. while riding squashed in a crowded public bus. (Sixty-five reais, the cost of the cheapest menu item during my visit, a risotto, gets you 28 bus rides.)
At least you get what you pay for. Restaurant lovers will recognize that they are in the hands of experts, a combination of production perfection and creativity.
It is perhaps a cliché to combine foie gras with local ingredients that have never been near a fattened goose liver, but it still creates an impression: first on the starters list was foie gras with, among other things, cambuci sorbet. Cambuci is one of those fruits so rare that even my geeky English-Portuguese fruit list that tells me that fruta-do-conde is sweetsop and pitanga is Surinam cherry doesn’t include it. But I don’t do 80-reais appetizers, so I went with the scallops in coconut milk with a slice of crispy mango, for a mere 50.
It was beautiful, but my friend Carolina’s salad (58 reais) was much prettier. It had thin, cozily curved slices of abobrinha squash dotted with tiny flower petals; crayfish hiding out underneath, and an extended ellipsis of pastel-orange passion fruit dots serving as an underline. It’s one of those eat-it-or-stare-at-it-moments, which I usually resolve by playing food blogger and taking a picture, irritating other diners with my flash, but capturing a shot that could be a screensaver.
Entrees were another blow-out success. Carolina, again proving her ordering prowess, got the baby pork ribs and forbidden rice with catupiry (73 reais). Forbidden rice, a purple-black heirloom strain that is not native to Brazil, worked fantastically with the catupiry, a creamy cheese that is a sort of national spread that goes in or on everything from fried appetizers to pizza. And the ribs managed to be in the zone where falling off the bone meets slightly crispy. It was, and I’ve never said this before, a rib I will remember a long time.
You can order desserts like cagaita sorbet — another fruit not even on my list — or you could just wait for the outrageous tray of sweets that comes with your espresso. They include Dadinho candies, little cubes of sugary peanut paste that were lost on me, but that anyone who was a child in Brazil in the last three or four decades will recognize. Just imagine Pop Rocks served at Le Cirque.
Since my visit, Mr. Atala has changed the menu, hand signing every one with a declaration that captures the changing nature of the city’s cuisine: “D.O.M. takes on its original vocation: to be Brazilian. I thus renounce the use of foie gras and truffles."
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