Inside the Protein Palace

This is the essential appeal of By Brazil II: You eat meat until you die. Massive, garlicy heaps of short ribs and spare ribs and sausage and rump roast and chicken are sliced off metal spears onto your plate by a parade of meat-bearing waiters, all for the fixed price of $13.90.

The Brazilian national dish may be the innard-rich bean stew feijoada; Brazilian croquetas and empadinhas are sold all over town. Churrasco, though, the Brazilian barbecue feast, seems to be the favorite meal of everybody who goes to Rio on vacation. And with Argentine and Colombian and Bolivian versions of the South American mixed grill packing in crowds at places such as Norah’s and the Gaucho Grill, a Los Angeles churrasco restaurant seems inevitable.

By Brazil II is a new Santa Monica churrasqueria in what was once an awful-ish Singaporean place, still trimmed with the kind of Raj-colonial trim that looks a little like New Orleans-style ironwork if you squint, decked out with a salad bar, populated by young Brazilian customers who look like extras in a spring-break movie filmed in Europe. Easy-listening-style Brazilian music floats out of speakers. Cashew-fruit juice (which here tastes a little like a dilute tincture of fruit cocktail) froths in the kind of beverage dispenser that usually holds nothing more exotic than Orange Bang. On half the tables are glasses of Brazilian Antarctica beer, which tastes fairly ordinary but has cute penguins embossed on the bottles.

Before the meat comes a pass through a buffet line not unlike the one you might have expected if your college dorm was in Sao Paulo: gummy lasagna, tired fried plantains, lousy vegetable soup, a strange sort of dairy-based shredded-chicken stew the waitress describes as “chicken stroganoff,” decent black beans and rice.

The little golf balls of cheese biscuit are better than they look, with pully, cheese-infused centers and a resonant hardtack crunch. You’ll find farofa-- coarse, dry manioc meal fried with bits of pork--whose appeal may elude you until you mix it into the beans as a gritty textural contrast. There is also a salad bar, pretty much what you’d expect plus an abundance of hearts of palm. . . . The buffet--which is to say, the entire menu at weekday lunch--is nothing to write home about.

But evenings, here’s the classic churrasco, brought to your plate until you cry uncle, one hunk of protein at a time. Sausages are pink, garlicky things, like Portuguese linguica; short ribs are chewy, with a distinct tang of smoke; pork ribs are oily and crisp. Roast beef is crusted black, juicy, possibly the only piece of cow you’ll ever find that tastes better well done than medium rare. Pretty much all of it is marinated in so much garlic that the smell of it clings to your clothes all the way home.

Desserts include a bright-yellow egg-yolk custard that tastes like something off a dim sum cart, an ordinary flan, and a fairly nice passion fruit pudding, but after the onslaught of beef and garlic, you probably won’t be able to manage more than a demitasse of freshly brewed Brazilian coffee.

* By Brazil II

1104 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica (310) 939-0447. Open Tuesday and Wednesday, 6 to 10 p.m.; Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 to 10 p.m.; Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 to 11 p.m.; Saturday, noon to 11 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking in rear. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Lunch for two, food only, $10-$14; dinner for two, food only, $20-$28