Midwest Grill

Then a couple of months ago my roommate was tipped off by some itinerant Brazilians he met in Los Angeles that the real stuff was in Inman Square, not Central. "Pampas, no," they told him. "You gotta try Midwest Grill!"

Well, pace the itinerant Brazilians, we still like Pampas, too. But it's been joined atop of our festive-restaurant list by this three-year-old spot, a bit less elaborate, a bit less expensive, and every bit as much of a kick.

As at Pampas, the focus of the Midwest Grill is churrasco rodizio -- roughly, "rotating barbecue." In this year of interminable, globe-straddling menus, there's something refreshing about a restaurant built around not just a single cuisine, but a single dish. Though "single" may be the wrong word: the churrasco is really a cornucopia all its own, an array, a profusion, an endless parade of . . .

Meat. Oh, man. Vegetarians be warned. Seven kinds of meats, minimum, turn on huge motorized spits in the restaurant's open kitchen; order the rodizio, which the menu cheerily refers to as the "Brazilian BBQ Banquet" ($14.95), and each of the rotating swords will, in turn, be lifted from the rotisserie, carried deftly to your table, and carved onto your plate. And then the cycle begins again. You can request skewers, too: ask for pork and you'll get pork. All night long.

For the grillmaster, a churrascaria is a balancing act. Keeping the right amount of meat on the cusp of readiness requires close attention to diners' tastes, and a constant eye on the coals. The proprietors -- Brazilian transplant Gilmar Pinto, former owner of Allston's Café Brazil; his brothers Marcelo and Gilnei; and their Portuguese partner João Pinto (no relation) -- pull the trick off with dexterity. The meat arrives with a uniformly crisp surface and a moist interior. Most of it is marinated in wine, vinegar, salt, and pepper; sirloin is rubbed with sea salt, and lamb is studded with garlic. The only exception we found were chicken hearts, which came on a sinister-looking double spit, and which -- perhaps because they were so small -- arrived rather overcooked on both nights we visited.

The catalogue of meats also includes pork spareribs, chicken breast, and linguiça, the spicy Portuguese sausage rampant in this part of Cambridge. The rodizio also comes with four side dishes, beginning with a garden salad before dinner, and progressing to communal bowls of feijão (stewed black beans), plain white rice, and feijão tropeiro, or "mule-driver's beans," a hopped-up black-bean dish with bits of bacon, egg, onion, and parsley, all dusted with cassava meal.

There's a small and competent non-rodizio menu available, with a few Portuguese dishes, a few Brazilian. An interesting starter is canjiquinha ($2.50), a pumpkin-colored soup of grits and beef, spiked with garlic, a dark pool of black beans lurking in the heart of the bowl. Or the appetizer of fried cassava and linguiça ($4.50), which, like everything at the Midwest, is large enough for everyone at the table to share. The cassava, a South American tuber, comes in the form of sweet, starchy cubes fried to a golden color.

The best vegetable bet may be the salada de palmito ($4.50), a generous green salad tossed with vinaigrette and stacked with beet slices and hearts of palm. The one vegetarian plate ("prato vegetariano," $8.50) consists of a bed of rice topped with pretty much every bit of vegetal matter available elsewhere on the menu: beans, collard greens, cassava, olives, fried bananas.

If you're in the mood for meat you really can't cook on a grill, there's always the rabada, or oxtail stew ($10.95). I've never had better braised oxtail than at Brazilian restaurants; this version is rich with potatoes and buttery-soft meat.

A real surprise was the grelhada-style chicken ($10.95), a boneless breast marinated in white wine, lemon, and parsley, then grilled and delivered to the table on a sizzling iron skillet. The meat was moist and tangy, one of the finest bits of poultry I've had in some time. Even less conventional was the moqueca ($11.95), a stew of shrimp, whitefish, and vegetables in a tomato-and-coconut sauce, with the coconut sweetness leavening the tomato bite.

The Midwest also offers a tray of cakes and flan ($2.50) for dessert, as well as mango ice cream ($3). There's a short wine list, but we washed all our meat down with $3 bottles of Sagres, a Portuguese lager. Surrounded by immortalized bits of cow (a head mounted on one wall, a lacquered hoof on another, a horn above our table), and lulled by Brazilian jazz from the duo in the front of the room, we digested our protein in bliss.

If a well-run rodizio is the product of one kind of monomania, the doorstop of a book that arrived recently on my desk is another. Cooking writer Lisë Stern has apparently spent much of her adult life skulking around takeout joints, wholesalers, and gourmet shops; the result is The Boston Food Lover, a 500-page compendium of the best ingredients and the best prepared food in the Hub. Searching for Cambodian groceries? A good Muslim butcher? Her list is vast but selective, and it makes diverting reading partly because Stern never bothers to hide her partisanship -- check out the three-page encomium to Herrell's ice cream. Even if your food shopping doesn't take you much farther than Stop & Shop, The Boston Food Lover is fascinating casual reading; and if you really care about food it will likely become indispensable. It's scheduled for publication June 28 (Addison-Wesley, $16). This information won't last forever, but, to Stern's credit, she stays away from the most ephemeral sector of the food world. The closest she gets to restaurants is in her chapter "Goodies to Go," which touches on everything from tuna sandwiches to cowfoot curry.