Small Shelly Fauna

But The Sign Said “All You Can Eat”!

So in my last post I noted that I did not have time to go to any churrascarias here. Well, yesterday was a national holiday (Brazilian Republic Day), so some time came into play, and so I was able to descend into the meat maelstrom that is a Brazilian steakhouse. My field is a small world indeed, and as it turns out, a crony of mine that I met in South Africa two years ago is now working here, so we hit up his favorite local churrascaria for dinner. It was a good move. For anyone not familiar with the concept, the deal with these places is you load your plate up with a bed of carbohydrates (rice, fried bananas, spiced manioc flour), take it to your table, then waiters come around with skewers laden with meats of every form, you point out what you want, and they slice you off a piece (it’s a flat fee for dinner, and you can eat as much as you want). You have to be careful to only ask for “a bit” of each if you want to try every kind available in a night, which is around 20 total. (I did go whole hog on the lamb, though, because it was easily the best example of that meat I’ve ever had.) In addition to really, really good beef fillets, the offerings included matambre (that means “hunger killer” in Spanish—you figure it out), garlic ribs, various and sundry succulent sausages, and, perhaps my favorite of the beef dishes, braised zebu hump. There was also one skewer that just had hundreds (literally hundreds) of cooked chicken hearts on it. I helped myself to quite a few—the heart muscle itself had been lightly cooked, but the aorta was all crispy, and it was delicious. (Apparently a very popular local dish is the xis corazon, a hamburger where, instead of a beef patty, they just press a ton of chicken hearts together.) Not having had a real dinner all week, I gorged myself to a ridiculous degree (as is expected in this kind of place). But wait, there’s more! Because Rio Grande do Sul is the heart of Brazilian gaucho-dom, in addition to having the best meat in the nation (and I’m now willing to say that until you’ve been to a churrascaria in Rio Grande do Sul, you haven’t been to a churrascaria), they pride themselves on the whole of gaucho culture. Which, in this case, means floorshows in the restaurant of traditional dancing. You know, with the baggy pants, spurs, and giant knives on the guys and the twirly, flowery skirts on the ladies, and a lot of fast footwork around spears. Also, they do bolas dancing, which is very cool indeed. A bolas is a pair of weighted balls connected by a cord, invented by the Indians as a throwing weapon—you swing it, it wraps around the legs of a deer or rhea, and brings it down. This weapon was adopted by the gauchos, and eventually incorporated into their dancing. It’s neat because not only is it like a twirling rope, it’s also a percussion instrument, with the weighted balls at the end rapping against the floor in perfect syncopation. The guys pride themselves on their accuracy—they’ll usually pull one of the diners up on stage to tousle their hair with rapidly spinning death weights or knock a cigarette out of someone’s mouth. These tricks were especially popular with the kids, who showed a hilarious mixture of fear and elation when the bolas would be swung out to smack against the edge of their table. Given that churrascarias are increasingly popping up in big American cities, you could probably get a similar experience, even with the show, in Orlando these days. The difference of course is that there you would be surrounded by obnoxious tourists, whereas I was eating with local Brazilian families just going out to dinner on a Thursday night, and also that I only paid around ten bucks American for the whole magilla.