RESTAURANT REVIEW : Brazilian Dishes Hit Right Note

Bread may be the staff of life in some countries, but in Brazil, it’s music. Farofa, a kind of fried manioc flour that Brazilians sprinkle on practically everything, comes in a close second.

So don’t act too surprised when you discover that there is live samba and bossa nova music at Brazil Grill, a matchbox-size restaurant on Ventura Boulevard. Often during the week (and always on Friday and Saturday evenings) you’ll catch singers such as Anna Isaura here, literally standing in one corner of this tiny room to do so. Local Brazilians, as expected, turn up like sunflowers to hear their music, clattering their silverware in tempo.

You could call the good food served here a bonus. This is a cuisine one would be tempted to describe as both exotic and pesante --that’s Portuguese for heavy. An abundance of tropical foodstuffs such as banana, manioc and palm oil figure into a good number of these recipes, with black beans and rice almost always in the equation. It’s also a meat-rich cuisine, centering around churrasco, the Brazilian style barbecue. Skip breakfast.

Most Brazilians start their meals with quitutes Brasilieiros, a variety of bite-size appetizers that, here at least, look a lot like a well-known brand of chicken croquette. Risoli and coxinha (pronounced co-SHEEN-ya) are identical in appearance, but certainly not in taste. Coxinha is a potato mixture filled with minced chicken and a light, peppery sauce. Risoli has a drier texture, better suited to its hearts of palm stuffing.

Likewise, empanadas are to be distinguished from empadas in subtle ways. Empadas are round--really miniature pies with a soft crust. They come filled with either shrimp or hearts of palm. Empanadas really look more like turnovers. The crust is made from white flour, and the filling is either minced chicken or ground beef.

But my surprise favorite here is kibbeh, a deep-fried cylinder of bulgur wheat filled with ground lamb--it’s practically the national dish of Lebanon. “How come you serve Lebanese food in a Brazilian restaurant?” I asked our friendly Brazilian waitress. “Our country is multinational too,” she replied in singsong English. “We have many Lebanese people in Brazil.”

If you come expressly for appetizers and salads, don’t overlook a dish called Brazilian antipasto. (All entrees come with a good house salad, making this slightly superfluous if you are having dinner.) It’s a giant platter of Greek olives, tomatoes, hearts of palm (plenty of them) and cooked eggplant topped with chopped onion, garlic and oregano. Enjoying the hearts of palm made everyone at our table feel guilty. Someone at my table even suggested we go down the street to Ben and Jerry’s after dinner to buy some Rain Forest Crunch.

After a couple of these main dishes, though, that idea seemed way too ambitious. About the heaviest thing to eat is feijoada, Brazil’s national dish, here served in a trencherman-sized tureen with sides of rice and collard greens. Feijoada has many possible interpretations, but the essentials are stewed black beans, various cuts of pork, linguica sausage and carne seca, a gristly sort of dried beef. The entire mixture should have a purplish tinge and be equivalent in weight to a small child.

There’s a specific way to eat this dish. Spoon a generous helping of boiled rice onto your plate, heap the beans and meat onto the rice and then sprinkle liberally with farofa. For those of you ordering this dish at lunch, soccer practice begins promptly at three.

A lighter choice would be the churrasco, served with farofa and fried bananas. If you order churrasco misto, you get beef, chicken and linguica, represented by three huge chunks. I’d call the beef tough but flavorful and the sausage somewhat oily. But the chicken is a masterpiece, ruddy and crusted with spice.

Lighter still would be dishes like bife a Milaneza, the schnitzel-style breaded steak popular all over South America, or shrimp Paulista, named for the mega-city of Sao Paulo. The shrimp are terrific, as intense with garlic as any you’ll ever taste. Brazilians just dump on the farofa and plunge in.

Brazilian desserts tend to be mercifully light, although not light enough to make up for what comes before them. The undisputed star is the manjar branco (a direct translation of the French blancmange) a feather-light ring of coconut cream pudding. Pudim de leite condensado is much like flan, if somewhat denser. Blame it on the bossa nova, as the lyric says.

Suggested dishes: coxinha , $1.75; Brazilian antipasto, $3.95; feijoada , $7.95; churrasco misto , $9.95; shrimp Paulista, $10.95.

Brazil Grill, 19649 Ventura Boulevard, Tarzana, (818) 996-7979. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 1-8 p.m. Sunday. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Parking lot. Dinner for two, $20-$35.