rev:text
| - Here's what's good about Brasa: the meat is not awful. The price is a little high, but it won't break the bank. Attractive dudes cut meat off of a sword and put it on your plate. There's a Chihuly chandelier in the dining room (actually pretty darn impressive). The service staff is sufficiently friendly.
What's bad about Brasa? Well, most other things. It's poorly lit and overly spacious. The salad/cold bar is pretty much the saddest little thing I've ever seen referred to as "fine dining." I guess the shrimp were cooked decently but the veggies didn't taste fresh, and almost everything was bland--IMPRESSIVELY bland. No, seriously, you have to TRY to make stuff taste this much like sawdust.
Speaking of sawdust, I'm pretty sure the little dish of "spices" they give you to dose your meat with is literally a bowl of bread crumbs.
Anyway, I expected a Brazilian steakhouse to not overcook every single cut they had to offer, and I ended up being pretty happy with-- and having a second or third round of-- a few of them. It's hard to go wrong with filet mignon rapped in bacon.
What I craved and did not receive while at Brasa was some other flavor than meat with my meat. I'm pretty sure half of the meat was completely unseasoned. This was a big disappointment; when your restaurant is based around serving different cuts of meat in a constant flow to your customers, I think you should inject a little bit of variability into that stream.
What keeps Brasa from 2-star-land is the fact that I really did enjoy a few of the many cuts they sent around our table. They were really, honestly good, and at another restaurant, just one slab o' beef will cost as much as your whole dinner at Brasa. You CAN eat good food at this place; there's just a whole lot of dodging the bad stuff to get to it.
I'm not yearning to go back, and I'm not going to be recommending it to friends anytime soon.
|