Brazilian Winter Dinner, Saturday, 12 December 2009

I had several ideas for what to do for this end of year dinner, ranging from dining at a top gourmet place, a medieval knights' feast and a Turkish fish bar in Moabit. In the end, I picked a completely different style of restaurant because I think most people would have had duck or goose or done some serious German Xmas-style grub by then. The gourmet restaurants are a little pushed so their quality may be suffering a little, the people running the knights' feast were pretty disorganised (and therefore worried me), and the Turkish fish bar, which sounds quite interesting, apparently does their best fish only on Wednesday and Fridays.

So instead I found this cool place in Mehringdamm which does authentic Brazilian dishes like feijoada, which is their national dish. We have tried a nice serious rodizio before but never a feijoada, so it does sound interesting, tempting, and rather different. To make it even better, this is not at all an expensive restaurant. Most dishes are around 10 Euro and even if you went for the ultra-meaty churrasquinho, it is still less than 12 Euro!

The place is called Cafe do Brasil, Mehringdamm 72, 10961 Berlin and their website is http://www.salgados.info if you want to check out their menu. I would suggest that the (few) vegetarians amongst us may not too excited about this event and may prefer to sit out this one.

As usual, if you wish to come along for a convivial slap-up meaty feast this December, please drop me an email as soon as possible. We have currently secured a medium sized booking but if the numbers are too big, we will resort to our electronic hat again. Closing date for requests is Tuesday, 1 December and all those who made it on the list will be notified by Monday 7 December latest.

The date for this Brazilian dinner, once again, is
Saturday 12 December, so please put that in your diary now if you are a meat-lover and interested.

As for those craving fine dining in Berlin, we will try to resume our gourmet dining programme again as early as possible next year. For example, I have heard that a top hotel may be doing a kitchen party again. Oh-oh... :o)

See you all soon!

Chris

How it went on the night...

It's not often one spent so little on dinner and got so much food, so in this respect, the evening was a raging success. The food itself is also rather yummy and meaty, although someone pointed out that there are quite a few vegetarian options as well. This was also one of our largest club dinners, with 27 people attending so we practically took over the rather small restaurant! Anyway, most of us enjoyed ourselves enough to consider coming back for the other dishes on the menu. I had the feijoada, which was much tastier than I had expected, even with the manioc flour, and chunks of orange, so if you have never tried the Brazilian national dish before, then this place does a pretty good version of it - at least I think so. It is also pretty darn filling - someone (who shall be nameless) told me that he can seriously eat and he still ended up leaving a third of his dish uneaten. It's that sort of place, and one shouldn't consider ordering starters unless one is planning a doggy bag home.

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