My quick tour through Brazilian cuisine
Since I'd been eating at a lot of kilo restaurants (buffet by weight) and snack stands, I'd had typical Brazilian dishes but didn't necessarily know it (other than all of that cod, and snack foods). So I decided to splurge at Brasil a Gosto, a restaurant off of a residential side street in the Jardins Paulista neighborhood, and highly recommended by folks on Chowhound and Lonely Planet. I guess it's sort of a "new Brazilian" restaurant.
It has a really fun, modern/rustic interior - here we are on the second floor, with gardens and greenery.
In a lot of Brazilian and Argentine restaurants, the servers automatically bring you some snacks while you are waiting for your food. These are technically optional, and you are charged for them, but you have to actually ask them to remove them from your table if you don't want them. Since I wanted to try everything, I didn't refuse. There were cracker sticks with different butter and cheese in pesto, and 5 different mini rolls: pumpkin, milk, corn, cheese, and a cheese puff
Next came an assortment of appetizers. Empanada with that red cheese, toasted rice cake, creamy crab to eat with the white crackers (will check up what flour they‘re made of later), grilled cheese on a stick with sugar cane syrup, a tasty thing in a pastry shell whose name and ingredients I completely didn’t understand, and banana and cheese on top of toast. On either side are a tomato in vinaigrette and a hot sauce (like Tabasco). You can see I ordered a caparioska with my meal (the waiter really recommended it!!). It’s crushed fruit mixed with vodka, and very refreshing. Since I didn’t know what fruit to get, I just told the waiter to make it mixed with whatever he recommended. It came back with passion fruit, strawberry, grape, and star fruit. I also got a coconut water.
Finally my main course came. I ordered the plate of the day, feijoada. This is what some people consider the most Brazilian of Brazilian dishes. It’s often eaten on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and today was a Wednesday (Argentina and Uruguay were like this too - certain dishes on certain days). It consists of black beans with pork and sausage (mine came separately), rice, collard greens, farofa (toasted cassava flour), and orange slices. This was served with what the waitress called “feijoada sauce” and the same hot sauce from the appetizer plate. You combine everything and eat it (though I asked about the oranges and the waitress said I could eat those at the end).
Boy was this salty! Every mouthful felt like an entire day’s allowance of sodium. I could only finish about half of the beans and pork, and barely any of the farofa (which tasted like pure salt). The most refreshing thing was the collard greens, which tasted nothing like what I had in the American South. These were bright green, and tasted very “green” too, i.e. just barely cooked.
I would still recommend coming to Brasil a Gosto if you’re visiting Sao Paulo, despite the feijoada experience (everything in Brazil is over-salted I feel). It’s a neat atmosphere, and the waiters are nice. Plus they give an explanation of what‘s in front of you before you eat, in English, so think of it as a mini-class in Brazilian cuisine. There are a lot of foods from all over Brazil in the menu. All of the food including drinks was US$40.
