Little Brasil

Food from Latin American cowboy country

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Little Brasil (617) 254-2077 170 Harvard Avenue, Allston Open Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m.; and Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa No liquor Sidewalk-level access

Brazilian restaurants in Boston do their best to present the cuisines of a large and multiethnic country. It remains the case, though, that most of the customers and most of the owners come from Minas Gerais, the cattle-country province west of Rio de Janeiro. Minas's food has its moments, but most of them are meat-and-potatoes moments not unlike those of our own cowboy states. The most prestigious cuisine of Brazil, the neo-African (and specifically neo-Yoruba) cooking of Bahia, turns up on Minas-American menus, but it's like ordering jambalaya in Utah -- the percentages are not on your side.

This said, Little Brasil is actually one of the larger Brazilian restaurants in Greater Boston, and does a very willing and pretty good and remarkably inexpensive job with lots of meat and starch, and a few vegetables and desserts. Very hungry people can eat very well here.

You should probably start with something fried, one aspect of their Afro-Portuguese heritage that all Brazilians take somewhat seriously. "Frango a Passarinho" ($3.95) is a heap of fried chicken, with the legs cut into slices so the meat is tasty and chewy. A crisp and fresh frying job makes this just excellent. "Mandioca Frita com Terresmo" ($3.95), translated as fresh fried yuca with pork cracklings, actually comes with meaty pork trimmings. It's a slightly different spin on the usual mandioca, without the garlic dip, but with a deadly, oil-based piri-piri hot sauce. Some of the yuca pieces were stringy and starchy our night, which is likely a sign of some older roots in the pile, a Boston hazard. "Banana Frita" ($3.25) is actually fried ripe plantains, cut the long way, and just as sweet as bananas, but with a different flavor.

Not everyone will want to appetize with this much starch and protein, but it is rather the Brazilian way. When you get to the entrées, you'll understand. A good solid Minas dish is "Lombo à Mineira," ($9.95), grilled pork loin steamed with lightly sautéed collard greens ($2.75 as a side dish), rice, and a dish of tutu de feijão. This last is a matter of gluey cassava paste, nicely flavored with smoked sausage, beans, scallions, and bits of egg. The appearance and texture aren't much, which may be why the dish hasn't been featured in previous Brazilian restaurants around here, but the flavor is good, and I would make a light lunch of this over rice. One problem: the rice our night was made with slightly rancid oil.

If you'd like to spend less and eat even more, the dish for you is "Little Brasil PF" ($7.95). This is the "house especial," and it comes with a lot of extras: your choice of fried or stewed chicken (the stewed is salty, with potatoes and carrots), stewed beef, rice, simple red beans, and your choice of a green salad or potato salad (the potato salad is strong on the mayonnaise, like many South American salads). Our server also added in an experimental shrimp version of the feijão. Shrimp-flavored cassava paste is not a bad variation on sausage-flavored cassava paste.

There is a third style, feijão tropeiro ($2.85 as a side dish), which adds toasted cassava meal -- the farofa sprinkled on some dishes elsewhere -- for a grittier, more polenta-like texture, with a bacon-scallion flavor and bits of sausage and egg.

People who want something familiar will be pleased with the "Filé com Fritas" ($9.50/11.95), a solid international platter of strip steak, fresh French fries, and rice, and beans, and a lettuce-and-tomato salad. The only dish I would steer clear of is the "Moqueca de Camarão" ($8.95/12.75). This is one of those Afro-Brazilian dishes from Bahia, and it requires a fairly careful combination of coconut milk and the smoky-tasting red-colored oil of the dendê palm, which was introduced from Africa. Dendê oil is imported into the US, but it's a funky, old fashioned flavor that not everyone likes to begin with. Little Brasil's cook did a fine job with the four giant shrimp but really wasn't up to the sauce, which left us with a lot of iffy rice but, of course, a table full of surplus food to put on it.

Dessert? Well, there are some dandy fruit juices and smoothies, in flavors as familiar as piña colada (no rum, but just as sweet to sip) and as exotic as passion fruit and caju (the dark fruit of the cashew nut). The juices are a $1.50 bargain; the smoothie styles are $3. Other desserts run toward starch. (Well, they could hardly serve more meat, could they?) Budim ($2.60) is caramel custard, "flan" in Spanish; the Brazilian version is whiter, with some binding starch, and just as delicious. Mingau de milho ($3) is cornmeal pudding, and that's what it is. There is also rice pudding, good smooth stuff rich in starch and sugar. And there are several pastries. These desserts work better with coffee, which -- as always in Brazilian restaurants -- is well made, fresh, and strong.

Service at Little Brasil is genuinely enthusiastic. On many nights, the co-owner is the only waiter, and his commitment to pleasing customers really stands out in this time of full employment, poorly trained servers, and general lack of civility.

Little Brasil is not heavily decorated, even by the travel-poster standards of other Brazilian restaurants. A quarry-tile floor is attractive. There was some background jazz our night. Presumably, this is what the owners like to hear as they work. Maybe the "Italian cuizine" menu is what they like to eat sometimes. But there's no need for more jazz or Italian food in Allston, and there is a healthy market for Brazilian food and music, once the word gets around.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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