THENASTYBITS (27 page)

BRAZILIAN
BEACH-BLANKET
BINGO

at the end of
a long shift, or six long shifts, I tend to look for a nice, soft, horizontal surface where I can slip quickly into a near-coma. Maybe, on the way, I'll stop for some raw fish and some liquor. Feeling, as I often do after work, like I've been beaten from head to toe with a garden hose full of ball bearings, I'm not likely to look for a nightclub. And since I work in a French steakhouse, the last thing I want to see at the end of the day is a skewer loaded with oversized hunks of Argentine beef. (In fact, after some of the things I've written, any waiter heading my way with sharp metal skewers usually has me reaching for my pepper spray.)

I do love sushi, however. And I love caipirinhas, the deadly, delicious drinks made from
cachaca
(sugarcane liquor), sugar, and fresh lime. And I like Brazilian music as long as there's no question of me dancing to it. Whenever I work a double shift, usually on Fridays or Saturdays, I take a break in the middle of the afternoon and walk a few blocks down from my restaurant to Sushi Samba on Park Avenue South. There, sitting at the sushi bar in my reeking whites and food-spattered clogs, I enjoy a nice cocktail, an order of
sawagani
(the tiny, insect-size crabs one sees skittering around in a fishbowl on the Sushi Samba bar), maybe some
uni
and
unagi,
a little toro, and an inside-out roll or two of fried soft-shell crab. For me, there were already many good reasons to like the restaurant and the people behind it, though until

2.II

my recent Brazilian Expedition, I'd never met them. Not until I'd gotten
the call.

I was in the back of a taxi on a cold, gray Seattle morning, rain drizzling down, headed out to the airport after a long, grueling swing across the country on a book-flogging tour. My phone rang, and it was the publisher of
Food Arts,
asking me if I wanted to go to Brazil.

Let's see. The beach? Rio? Palm trees? Tanned flesh in tiny little bathing suits? I don't know. I think I can do that. When he told me I'd be accompanying the Sushi Samba crew, chronicling their explorations of the food, music, and culture of Sao Paulo, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro, I said something thoughtful and measured, something along the lines of, "Dude, I am there!"

Once back in New York, I threw some cutoff shorts, a few T-shirts, sandals, and a bathing suit into a bag and headed for the rendezvous at the restaurant.

There were seven intrepid adventurers in our party. None of us spoke Portuguese. Shimon Bokovza, one of the Sushi Samba owners, a tough, energetic Israeli, was the only one who'd been to Brazil before. I was introduced to Shimon's partner, Matthew "Matty" Johnson, an ex-cop, legendary ex-nightclub owner, and one of those people who, ten seconds after meeting them, I decide is a compadre, an amigo, a Noo Yawk-talkin' wise-ass ball-buster of the old school. With us also were Eiji Takase, aka Taka, Sushi Samba's Japanese chef; Michael Cressotti, formerly of Patria, who heads up the South American end of the restaurant's menu; Danielle Billera, Shimon's wife, our chief organizer/scoutmaster (responsible for keeping Matty out of jail); and Philadelphia-based food writer and author Aliza Green.

Sushi Samba, I was informed, was about to open a big, new store in the West Village, a two-hundred-seater with rooftop dining room. The idea of our trip was to flesh out and expand the Brazilian elements of the menu and design. We were going to eat "everyday" Brazilian food and investigate the markets, ingredients, lifestyle, and culture of the country. We were going to have a good time.

Matty, I discovered on the first leg of the trip, has an enviable ability to sleep anywhere at any time. One minute conscious, the next? Dead to the world. The bastard slept all the way to Sao Paulo (and on every subsequent flight). I kidded him it was his police training. It took a nicotine patch, two sleeping pills, and a cocktail for me to get a brief, fitful nap, jammed upright in a center seat. I could hear Matty snoring, six rows away.

Sao Paulo is
big.
It's the third-largest city in the world, with fifteen million people, many of them living in absolutely abject poverty. The rest seem to spend all their time in cars (the traffic is unbelievable). The largest industrial center in Latin America, Sao Paulo has skyscrapers, banks, public buildings, monuments, parks, and museums that are offset by mammoth shantytowns called favelas, acres of dirt-floored shacks built out of cardboard, planks, rags, and pilfered construction materials that occupy any open spaces where they are tolerated. The city, as Paulistas will cheerfully tell you, is for the most part ugly as hell: a polluted, run-down, visibly crumbling sprawl where a thriving ultrarich upper class "trickles down" little of its loot. Crime, the guidebooks assured me, is rampant, with an accent on muggings, home invasions, kidnapping, armed robbery, and pickpocketing. According to the guidebooks, while in Brazil you will inevitably be robbed at knife point, be stabbed by murderous transvestite hookers, or have your jewelry snipped off by feral youths who live in the street and emerge from their lairs only to sniff glue and make off with your Rolex.

Anticipating an aggressively larcenous populace and tropical climes, I arrived in Brazil with a ten-dollar watch bought at the airport, cutoffs, T-shirts, and sandals. Unfortunately, Sao Paulo, particularly in September, is cold. The throngs of knife-wielding miscreants never materialized. Nobody even looked at me crosseyed, anywhere in Brazil. But I was freezing my ass off.

On the first morning, our party rose early and walked to the

Mercado, the market in the city's center. Shimon can't pass a food stall without trying it out; so within fifty yards of the hotel we were drinking sugarcane juice. The vendor simply takes a whole length of sugarcane, cranks up a loud, menacing-looking contraption of ancient gears, and feeds the cane in, crushing and squeezing the bark until a dribble of the ultrasweet juice trickles into a plastic cup. Breakfast! A few yards down the road, Shimon honed in on a mob of Paulistas clustered around another stall, this time eating
bolinhos
(little fried balls of salt cod or manioc) and
pastels
(delicious meat pies that look like flat
zeppole),
which the locals tear open and douse with hot sauce. We dug in. We soon found that these stalls are everywhere, serving deep-fried meat and vegetable pies, breaded fried balls of who-knows-what, and candied chunks of coconut, just about all of it greasy and delicious. I saw Shimon, Michael, and Taka taking it in as they ate, thinking, no doubt, "Bar menu!"

The Mercado, situated in an old limestone Beaux-Arts palace long gone to seed, was quiet but impressive. Live poultry, Amazonian fruit, mushrooms, dende (palm oil), hearts of palm, okra, sugarcane, ginger,
graviola
(custard apple),
marajuca
(passion fruit),
beterraba
(beet root), all were displayed in neat stacks. We hit a quiet restaurant for a lunch of whole roasted fish and Chilean wine and then headed off to Liberdade, the Japanese district.

Sushi and samba together is not as kooky-sounding a concept as you might think, some awkward hybrid of cuisines that shouldn't have anything to do with each other. Brazil hosts the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan, and has since they started coming over to farm and do business in 1808. Sushi is very popular here, even in traditional
cburrascarias,
where a buffet loaded with sushi and sashimi is considered an additional enticement. Liberdade is filled with sushi bars, yaki-tori joints, karaoke bars, shops, pachinko parlors, and Japanese steakhouses. Sad to say, however, the quality and variety of sushi we saw was less than spectacular. When we returned to the area for dinner, we were disappointed to find Sushi Yassu, said
to
be one of the best in town, closed. We ate instead at Restau-rante Suntory, a big, swank Benihana-style steakhouse-sushi bar-nightspot where an inept griddle cook hacked listlessly at some undistinguished meat. Taka and Michael and I (the chef contingent) cringed each time he brought his knife blade down against hard metal, then scraped it across the surface like a spatula. The sushi was decent but unsurprising. I'm only guessing—Taka is a man of few words—that this lame re-creation of Japanese cuisine was excruciating for him.

Late that night, some of our posse went on to a
cachacaria
where more than two hundred different brands of the potentially lethal cane liquor are offered (I wisely, and uncharacteristically, declined to go along). The next morning, Michael and Taka looked like they'd been dragged through a battlefield by their heels. They still managed to get down an impressive Brazilian breakfast, though: three varieties of fresh fruit juice, great coffee, cold cuts, chorizos, baked goods, and eggs. I ducked out after breakfast and bought a sweater, then did a little sightseeing in the city center. For lunch, I stopped at the
lanchonetes,
little stand-up eateries selling snacks and beer and sodas. To my delight, my inept Mexican-infected kitchen Spanish, while amusing to the Portuguese-speaking locals, was apparently understandable.

The next day, we visited Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo's largest. The weather was beautiful, and the park was mobbed with tens of thousands of school kids and locals. At first look, Brazil seems to be a
Utopia
of race mixing and integration. Black, white, every hue of coffee-colored person, seem to hang out, intermarry, make love, and socialize with little or no distinction. I'm sure it's not all that simple, and there are centuries of backstory, but it looks idyllic, particularly compared to New York.

Lunch was in Bela Vista, Sao Paulo's Little Italy. The chefs became decidedly more enthusiastic at this meal. Platters of spicy grilled shrimp,
ensopados
(Portuguese-style stews), whole fish, squid stew in a hearty tomato-cumin broth like I've enjoyed in Provincetown and New Bedford, and heaps of good stuff—little of it Italian. Michael and Taka scrawled notes furiously, asking for menu copies and even taking a tour of the kitchen. A late-night trip to another
cachaqaria
lifted everyone's spirits further and the following morning we left for the airport. Next stop: Bahia.

Bahia is a whole different story. We knew it before the plane hit the tarmac. There was sand. There were palm trees. And when we descended from the plane, the balmy, tropical heat was exactly what I'd been hoping for. Bahia is the African heart and soul, the main vein of everything one dreams about when one imagines Brazil. Sensual, spiritual, boasting spicy African-influenced cuisine, colonial architecture, percussion-heavy tro-picale music, voodoo, and some of the best beaches in South America, it's everything I like in a place, somewhere one can easily imagine reinventing oneself as a beach bum, mystic, fugitive, or permanent expatriate. You know you're somewhere else in Salvador, Bahia's capital and major city. Favelas climb steep hillsides and bluffs, sleek hotels tower over the Bay of All Saints, and there is music and magic and food everywhere.