Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [125]
“I’ve narrowed the choices to two,” Bill replies. “The nearby, posh Caesar Park Hotel has a feijoada buffet on Saturday, though the setting doesn’t seem right. This is a slave dish, after all, not an upper-crust meal. But the best alternative, an old institution called Confeitaria Colombo, is downtown, a fair distance by cab.”
“Let’s go there,” Jan says. “It will give us a chance to see more of the city.”
The trip certainly does. Our inexperienced but eager-to-please taxi driver, unaccustomed to requests to go to the rather dowdy Centro, can’t find the restaurant. He’s heard the name, and knows the general location, but takes us around in circles for more than an hour before finally dropping us off. By the time we’re seated, around 2:00 in the afternoon, most of the other patrons are moving on to dessert, and when we leave three hours later, no other diners remain.
Confeitaria Colombo opened in 1894, just as the historic downtown entered its golden age. For the first half of the twentieth century, until the national government began moving in 1960 to the new capital of Brasilia, this square mile of metropolis glittered more brightly than any spot in Latin America. It housed not only both branches of Congress and a multitude of ministries, but also Brazil’s most prominent theaters, newspapers, banks, hotels, restaurants, and dance halls.
Few places represented the vibrant magnificence better than the Colombo. Portuguese immigrants founded the establishment as a pastry and sweets salon (hence, confeitaria) and added a fashionable ladies’ tearoom in 1922 that evolved into a restaurant. It still looks today like it did then, brimming with belle époque splendor. A massive stained-glass ceiling splashes tinted sunlight across display cases filled with cakes and candies, tables topped with Italian marble, ornate French fixtures, Portuguese tile floors, and, best of all, eight monumental Belgian mirrors that each weigh as much as a car. In its heyday, the Colombo hosted the political, business, and intellectual elites of the city, including such regulars as poet Olavo Bilac. This Saturday, the restaurant, like the rest of the Centro these days, has to settle for ordinary folks like us.
Following custom, we start our feijoada banquet with a caipirinha, our first of dozens over the days ahead. A potent blend of Brazilian cachaça (strong sugarcane brandy) and coarse sugar muddled with the juice of a lime cut into small chunks, the drink supposedly cuts the fatty richness of feijoada. Whatever: it tastes great. While we sip the cocktails, Cheryl and Mary regale Jan and Bill with stories of their first trips together in Europe, when they both spent a year abroad at Salzburg College. Mary laughs about some of the guys Cheryl attracted, particularly a vagabond sailor in Majorca, saying, “Even Bill the reprobate was a better catch than him.”
Cheryl retorts, “At least I wasn’t loony enough to jump into Venice’s Grand Canal.”
“Those jerks who made the dare promised me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for that and never even gave me a drop.”
The tales stop temporarily with the appearance of two formally attired waiters, a grizzled veteran of fifty-two years with a sly sense of humor and a more proper young man who speaks some English. They motion with a broad sweep of their arms at the buffet setup, ready apparently to give us a joint tour of the goodies. Pointing one at a time to a variety of big iron pots on a large central table, the younger gent recites, “Black beans, pork ribs, smoked pork loin, peppered pork sausage, carne de sol,” which is salted, sun-dried beef. His colleague starts adding emphasis now to the enumeration by indicating different parts of his body. “Beef tongue, pork ears, pork feet, and pork tails.”
A second long table nearby offers a profusion of possible accompaniments, accents, and side dishes: rice, vinegar laced with hot malagueta chiles, sautéed collard greens, orange segments, farofa (toasted manioc meal), sautéed plantains, and banana fritters. Another smaller table presents a dozen desserts,