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Tropeiro

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Liam Hetherington
Liam Hetherington
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10) Tropeiro - Carnival - a Farewell to Meat

10) Tropeiro - Carnival - a Farewell to Meat

Brazil - 23/02/09

Nei, the patron of Tropeiro, told us a story. He had been working for a variety of Manchester’s premier restaurants since he arrived from Brazil, but always harboured a dream of opening his own establishment. He was alerted to an opportunity when a restaurant folded on Sackville Street. Visiting the location, Nei found that the entrance itself actually stood on the corner of Sackville and a shorter alleyway… an alleyway by the name of Brazil Street. How could he fail to turn his dream into a reality…?

There are three Brazilian eateries in the city centre – Botego Brazil in the Arndale Market, Pau Brasil on Ancoats, and Tropeiro opposite Sackville Gardens. The latter two are churrasqueiras. Churrasco simply means barbecue, and flame-grilled meat lies at the heart of the dining experience here. It is a cuisine that descends from the cowboys or tropeiros of southern Brazil, and the interior décor of their namesake restaurant is decorated with frescos of these hardy individuals roasting joints of meat over their campfire.

The prix fixe menu is £19.55. For this you can eat as much as you want (or are able to). Paul and I each ordered a bottle of Brazilian beer (Palma Louca, a brand I had not previously heard of). This was a pale, slightly hoppy beer. Its taste, and the fact that it was served in tall slim glasses, reminded me of kölsch, the characteristic beer of Cologne. As we drank the patron explained the concept. There was a salad bar from which we could help ourselves – but take it slowly he urged. We shouldn’t take too much as meat would be coming up fresh from the kitchen as soon as it was cooked. This is the concept of rodizio. Rather than cooking a discrete portion of meat – an 8 oz steak, say – the chefs would work on entire joints. When they were ready these would be brought up and carved fresh for anyone who wanted any. There were ten different types of meat on offer that day, so it was important to pace oneself.

Wise words indeed. And the salad bar was tempting. It was not just salad, but cheese, a wide-range of beans, rice and potatoes. There were also tureens of stew. One I was determined to try was the Brazilian national dish, feijoada. This is a black bean and pork stew, and was an inky purple in colour. I can’t say I liked it. It was fatty and acrid to the taste. Apparently it dates from the colonial period, when meat was reserved for the Portuguese ruling classes only. Slaves, blacks, and native Brazilians were forbidden to eat meat. Hence, the ‘pork’ in feijoada came in the forms of fat, offal and the more unpalatable parts of the pig. I’m not sure how true this feijoada was to the traditional recipe, but I have to say it did not find favour with my palate. Still, worth a try!

However, I ain’t no slave. So bring on the meat. And this they proceded to do. Every five or ten minutes a waiter in gaucho pants would emerge from the downstairs kitchen with a skewer of meat and a hefty knife to carve at your table. No sooner had we sat down than savoury pork ribs appeared, hot and lightly charred from the oven. I hadn’t finished mine when he was back again, this time with a skewer of sausages. Apparently these were traditional Brazilian sausages, linguica, but to me they tasted just like Lincolnshire with their herb-flavoured pork. These were followed up by chicken breast wrapped in bacon. This was a real success, as without the fat provided by the bacon the chicken could have been too dry on its own.

Next to appear was beef skirt. This had been rather overcooked. I was disappointed in it. However, the waiter brought around a second lot of skirt later on and insisted that I have another piece as this had been prepared better. He was right; this was nowhere near as charred and was much more succulent. Also from the cow came a thick chunk of meat from the top of the rump. For me, this really was absolute top quality beef. As Paul commented, it had the "Wow" factor. There was nothing special about it, it was just a high-quality piece of prime rump, cooked to perfection. As our waiter carved off slices a cross-section of the joint appered before us – dark brown on the outside edges, fading through to progressively paler shades of brown, on to pink, and then a red core. In terms of texture and taste the contrast between the salted and flame-grilled outer and the liquescent heart was just superb. Top marks guys!

The beef rib was a disappointment after this. His father’s costela, cooked slowly for six hours, was apparently what inspired Nei to be a chef. They came as big meaty bones, but they were just too fatty for my preferences, and I found myself trimming away half the meat. I know, I know – they’re beef ribs, what do you expect? So probably that was a comment more on my tastes than on the preparation of the dish.

The leg of lamb (cordeiro) was another highpoint, marinated in garlic, rosemary and salt. (A warning – most of the meats had experienced being rubbed with salt before being grilled, so overall they had a tendency to be a bit on the salty side, certainly on the exterior of the joints. A work colleague who had previously been to Pau Brasil advised to sit as far from the kitchen door as possible; that way the salty rind will have ended up on someone else’s plate before they get to your table. So maybe a churrasqueira is not the place for someone with high blood pressure or who has been advised to cut down on salt in their diet).

One final meat that came out did test the limits of what I was prepared to eat. The waiter approached with a fine skewer onto which small olive-sized bits were threaded. These were, he informed us, chicken hearts. Now I have a tendency to run from any bit of meat named after an organ, so I was more than willing to pass on this course until Paul forced me to have some. And in actual fact they weren’t bad, just a stronger, more intense chicken flavour. After all, the heart is just a muscle, he pointed out.

Meat kept coming out in rotation, so I was able to get more than one helping of certain dishes. Plus the salad bar was always within reach. It was only when I had been eating for 1 ¾ hours and had used a toilet trip to surreptitiously perform a spot of ‘quantative easing’ of my belt that I had to raise the white flag. No more. I was stuffed. However, value fans, it is fair to point out that had I not been full to bursting I could quite easily have sat there all night and continued eating for no extra charge. I did have a yearning for an aperitif though, so I ordered a caipirinha to come along with the bill. For those not in the know, a caipirinha is a sweetly potent cocktail, and the national drink of Brazil. Its ingredients are simply lime, muscovado sugar, cruched ice, and cachaça, a spirit made from sugarcane and similar to rum. This proved to be both lip-tingling and pack a heck of a kick. This cost £6.00. With the beers at around £4.00 this meant that I had spent a tenner on drinks, but only £19.55 on the actual grub.

So, who would Tropeiro appeal to? Or maybe it is easier to ask who wouldn’t it appeal to? With the all-you-can-eat salad bar even vegetarians should be able to stuff themselves silly. Though frankly the place is a carnivore’s paradise. Those who have been advised to cut down on salt in their diet should maybe think carefully about coming here, and it wouldn’t really be a great idea to come after a large lunch. But for everyone else I can certainly recommend a trip down to Brazil Street.

An afterword: the next day the papers were full of pictures of samba dancers in the streets of Rio. It was Brazilian carnival, which maybe meant that it was an auspicious time to go to a Brazilian restaurant. Then I remembered the meaning of the word "carnival". Literally it means "a farewell to meat", and represented the last bout of indulgence before Lent. I'm not saying that I would give up meat for an entire 40 day period, but I did find that I did automatically spend the next two or three days on a vegetarian diet as I gave my gut chance to digest the rich meat I had consumed in such abundance...

From journal Around the World in 80 Meals! (part 1)

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