Where: Rodizio Preto, Wilton Street, Victoria
How much: £15 for access to hot and cold buffets and £20 a head for the full meaty menu
Come here if: you're organising a big party for carnivores who don't take themselves too seriously.
No matter how hard I think about it, I just can't force myself to really recommend Rodizio Preto to you. It's trying so hard (and succeeding) on so many levels, but the whole just didn't quite work. I knew it was too good to be true when, scanning around for somewhere to take the Radio Star for a (very) belated Christmas dinner, I came cross Victoria's very own all you can eat Brazilian meat buffet... So many reasons why that sentence should make sense.
The restaurant themes itself as a Churrascaria, a Brazilian BBQ restaurant. After filling your plate with hot and cold Brazilian starters and sides (don't get too much.. seriously) you sit back and wait for the Passadores to arrive. Translating essentially as meat waiters, they bring large skewers to your table, carving off hunks of animal to order.
It's a modern but undistinguished Latin American cafe style place focussed around that large buffet counter. Think 3* hotel breakfast room in the Algarve with canned Portuguese pop pumping out of the TV on the wall and you won't go far wrong. But you're not here for the look, you're here for the meaty experience. Friendly staff give you a card to place on your table that you swivel between 'Sin' and 'Nao' depending on your need for meat. They ignore it mostly, piling delectable cut on top of cut. Feel free to turn them down early on, I looked away from my plate for a second and returned to 4 or 5 lumps of cow. It's a marathon, not a sprint...
The skewers work, really well in the main, though miss hits come with a chicken sausage, too doughy for all of us, and a too tough fillet steak wrapped in bacon (what? Why!?). Other than that, chicken thigh takes the cooking process well, caramelised, crackling skin protecting the tender flesh, but as you'd expect, the real highlights are the slivers of steak, three or four different cuts or twists, served mainly rare and oozing with taste. The umami notes in the charred edges of the steak are heady and superbly flavoursome, tastebombs in your mouth to be savoured. Pork loin is another winner, unctuous porky fat delivering a whallop of taste. I'd recommend taking a thick piece of the beef shoulder too. It's a fatty cut, but takes to the churrasco grill superbly, fat rendering into moist flavour.The salad bar disappointed a little. It's 'traditional', if you use traditional as a euphemism for cheaply prepared, fairly bland food you don't recognise. Hot sides consisted of rock solid cheese 'puffs', insipid and tasteless polenta cubes, onion rings and little breaded torpedos of deepfried plantain. The cold options were either mayonnaise based cubed veg, rice, or selections of random veg. As I say, keep it tight and leave room for the cow. Have a salad for lunch if you're worried about the state of your waistline.
