The churrascaria is an intriguing example of how food culture changes across different regions, even when the actual food can stay more or less consistent. For the unitiated, a churrascaria is a Brazilian steakhouse serving all sorts of meat cuts, mostly smoked barbecue-style over charcoal. Of course for the most authentic, cost-effective, and delicious experience, one must travel to Brazil and see how it is really done. But there are fair immitations elsewhere. My first experience with churrasco was at Fogo de Chão, possibly the best known of the upscale churrascarias in the States. This place was amazing, and has been one of the restaurants I miss the most since coming over to Europe.
Later I had the opportunity to go down to Brazil and sample a churrasco the authentic way. I was surprised to learn that Churrascaria need not be excessively overpriced, and that all you can eat, amazingly cooked meat of all imaginable cuts, could be had for not much more than the cost of a normal meal. Now that’s not to say that Brazilians go out and gorge themselves on Churrasco every night of the week – but for about 20 dollars a person, I imagine many Brazilians can afford to make it a weekly or bi-weekly family occasion. Oh, and of course, the meat in Brazil…amazing!
So it’s strange that it took me so many years to venture out in London to try a local churrasco here, but I guess the explanation would be that I was already a bit aware that Churrascarias here are more in the food chain category of restaurants, not many notches up from Nandos. Ok I’m exaggerating a bit, but that was my impression. It turns out Rodizio Rico has 3 locations – Westbourne Grove, Islington, and North Greenwich. On this occasion we made a rather unplanned visit to the Westbourne Grove branch, upon realizing we happened to be in the neighborhood and hungry enough to go for an endless eating fest. I’ll just generally note that I visited one other Churrasco in London some time back, close to Bond Street if I recall, and while it was not bad, it did not compare to Rodizio – don’t have much more detail than that.
If you haven’t been to a churrascaria before, let me try to illustrate the experience for you, as it is a bit different from any other restaurant I’ve experienced. There are 2 components (well, 3 if you count the Caipirinhas beforehand). First, you make a quick trip to the salad bar to load up on salads, veggies, and rice. The trick here is really to get enough to balance out the insane amount of protein and fat you are about to consume, but not too much that you don’t have room on your plate! But the problem is, some of this stuff is so good you have got to have a bit of it, and so of course you end up getting too much, as I did:
I can’t really describe everything on this plate, but I’ll highlight a few items – note on the left side, a green chimichurri type sauce, and also I think a red chutney, indian style – these are sauces that can accompany some of the meat cuts, although most don’t really need them. The green sauce would be particularly good for lamb or perhaps chicken. On the right there is a bit of mushrooms and meat (chicken?) in creamy gravy, really nice. There are some marinated aubergines and mushrooms in the middle, a veg medely mix, marinated olives, some Brazilian lasagna dish, and others. There is also white rice somewhere I hope, or maybe I just waited until I had enough room on the plate to get the rice on after. It’s not a precise science.
So, once we are ready for the meat, we have a small disk on the table in front of us, red side up at this point. We flip it over to the green side. Interesting to note that this is the same whether we are in the chain restaurants in the UK, the more upscale ones in the US, or even the authentic ones in Brazil. So it seems that universally, green is accepted as force-feed me absurd amounts of meat. Because that is what they do – a good churrascaria should have so many Brazilian boys running around offering you meat that it pretty much never stops coming, and the best will also somehow make you feel guilty every time you refuse what they are offering, as if somehow you have offended the barbecue dish that was passed down from their own great grandmother’s family recipe. You want to have this feeling of guilt and being force-fed – it’s all part of the experience, I think.
The cuts of meat are presented on skewers – each garçom comes around with a particular cut, hopefully tells you what it is, and barely gives you time to accept or refuse before they start chopping off a couple of more than bite-size slices with an alarmingly huge carving knife. You take the meat with a small pair of tongs that are part of your place setting along with fork and knife.
Not sure what cut this is, but it was not too memorable.
This particular one is a bit too dry, like roast beef.
The best cut – juicy inside, crispy charcoal smoked flavor outside. Next time I’ll just load up on this!
Chicken hearts. I remember having these before at another churrascaria and being fairly impressed, but these did not really do much for me. I took several of them but didn’t finish them.
Now this is where I might note a few differences with the Rodizio experience, based on what I’ve become used to. First, the restaurant is simply not big enough for the scale necessary to keep every possible cut in constant play throughout the restaurant. At Fogo you pretty much have every cut somewhere on the floor at all times, and it’s just a matter of waiting for them to make their way over to you. But at Rodizio, the place is only really big enough for 3 or 4 waiters, and so they have a rapid-fire routine where the chef is always preparing the next skewers and rotating them to the waiters. But this did result in quite a bit of lag time, and a lot of dissapointment as we watched the cuts that we really wanted get finished off the skewer on the other side of the room before the waiter ever circled over to our side. This is particularly distressing towards the end of the meal, because you end up sitting there waiting and waiting for that one last piece that you really want before you decide to call it quits. Of course you can make special requests if you know what cut you want.
Pork ribs? Some kind of ribs, I enjoyed them, my companion did not.
So to summarize the experience, it was better than my initially low expectations, but still a bit hit and miss. There weren’t quite enough meat cuts that really blew your socks off, and you really had to wade through a number of mediocre ones to find them. But the meat was still pretty decent, and those couple of exceptional cuts were really amazing, and you really can’t beat all-you-can-eat meat for sunday lunch, so I’m not going to complain too much. I was not particularly impressed by the service though. For 2 adult buffets, a large bottle of water, and 2 drinks, plus service, the bill came to just under £70. A bit pricey for a Sunday lunch, but if you make the most of the meat and buffet you can get your money’s worth. I might go back when the craving becomes unbearable again, or I might just hold off until my next trip home for a Friday night dinner at Fogo.
Rodizio Rico
http://www.rodiziorico.com
111 Westbourne Grove
London
W2 4UW
020 7792 4035
The original set of high-res photos is here.
