![]() Simply take two of the guarnicoes (side dishes) that come along with it, some rice a la Rio (a mild pilaf with carrot and celery) and some farofa (fried flour from the manioc root), then mix them all up together. There’s a specific way to eat feijoada, and Yolie (or Carmen, her beautiful Brazilian buddy) will come to the table for a demonstration. Yolie’s feijoada is served in a mammoth casserole dish, consisting of stewed black beans, pork spare ribs, linguica (an oily Portuguese sausage) and carne seca, a gristly dried beef that I’m told is imported from South America. I’d decided on the feijoada while the rest of my friends had the churrasco. It’s a Brazilian version of prawns in garlic sauce, and everyone at my table literally fought over the last scraps. You get more than you bargain for with this dinner, but I’d still advise you not to miss the house scampi, a special appetizer that can be shared by up to four people. Bom approveito (that’s Portuguese for bon appetit) ! Seconds on a favorite are yours for the asking. Waiters come around with various sabres, plant the point on your table, and then slice some meat off for you. ![]() It’s basically all you can eat, beginning with a choice of salad or black bean soup, then progressing to a parade of meats and side dishes. It tastes a little like a margarita minus the salt-sweet, big on lime juice and deceptively powerful-but it goes down a whole lot easier.ĭinner is a set affair at a set price. Start things off with a frosty caipirinha, a Brazilian aperitif made from a sugar cane brandy known as cachaca (ka-SHA-sa). It’s about 20 feet from the floor of the restaurant to the ceiling, and the ground level of the mall, visible over a balcony lined with uprooted tropical plants, seems equally far down.īut once you’re seated at your table, the wicker-lined chairs and green polyester tablecloths seem anything but foreboding or exotic. The dining area is essentially a loft space, occupying the top level of a post-modern shopping mall, and the sense of vast, eerie space overwhelms you as you enter. (And if mesquite is Brazilian, Pele is a Swede.) Strangely enough, the restaurant’s design is basically all-American, right down to a brick-lined window affording a view of the kitchen’s mesquite-filled barbecue pit. Feijoada, the only other Brazilian main course dish she serves, is available on Friday and Saturday nights. Yolie specializes in a relatively obscure method of cooking known as churrasco (shoo-RAHS-co), in which meats are cooked on swordlike skewers, then literally sliced from the skewer onto your plate. Most Brazilians subsist on black beans (feijoes, in Portuguese) and rice, combining them with meat and sausage in a national dish known as feijoada (mellifluously pronounced fezh-WA-da). I should mention that she operates a specialty restaurant. ![]() ![]() Now she’s packaged up the concept and literally taken it on the road. She opened her first restaurant there-Yolie’s Brazilian Steakhouse-four years ago. She’s pretty exotic herself, a Sao Paulo native of Italian extraction who has lived in Las Vegas for the past 20 years. Whatever the reason, Yolie Piccoli aims to change it. ![]()
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