Restaurant Review: Cork's Sabor Braziil is a taste of home for Brazilian exiles

"...according to more than a few local Brasileiros, SB is where you go to recall your mother’s home cooking, for an unadorned taste of home."

Sun, 12 May, 2024 - 16:46

Joe McNamee

Sabor Braziil
5 Washington St, Centre, Cork, T12 HY1X
Open: Sun to Wed, 11am-8.30pm; Thurs, 11am-9.30pm; Fri/Sat, 11am-11.30pm
https://www.instagram.com/saborbraziil
Tel: 083 141 8024
The Bill: €140 for four (excluding tip, including drinks)

Sabor Braziil (SB) is on that gritty little strip where Washington St meets the Grand Parade that has seen myriad low-budget food ventures come and go over the years, and the interior of SB is, accordingly, cheap, cheerful, and functional.

I have never been to Brazil, though not for the want of dreaming.

Instead my knowledge of the country, most especially food and food culture, has been gleaned entirely secondhand from Brazilians I have met over many years; friends, acquaintances, chefs, and hospitality workers and even erstwhile in-laws, supplemented by roving reporting of Irish friends who have lived there for decades, all capped with some good old-fashioned book learning.

It’s estimated that Brasileiros make up 1.5% of our population, the largest Latin American group in Ireland, so it is hardly surprising to find them embedded in hospitality.

In Cork, chef Victor Franca turns out fine authentic Brazilian barbecue at Nua Asador, while Paladar chef Nascimento Nunes does a very tidy job of turning good Irish produce into classic Latin American dishes.

But according to more than a few local Brasileiros, SB is where you go to recall your mother’s home cooking, for an unadorned taste of home.

Though I’d fight and die for a bag of Tayto, buying them by the boxful when I lived abroad, I’m well aware just how much of their taste profile was enmeshed in an exile’s emotional memory, and that a more neutral appraisal might be less gushing.

So it is with a lot of the ‘supporting’ dishes on the SB menu, hovering in and around the ‘pleasant if uninspiring’ mark: Crispy tilapia fingers are a more upmarket version of our fish fingers; Empadinha is shortcrust pie (we choose palmito, palm heart); and deep fried salgadinhos (cheese, beef or chicken) are a robust, less compelling cousin of croquetas.

We Gaels have always fancied ourselves as natural-born Latinos in temperament somehow marooned in the colder North and share with Brazilians a mutual love of a good party.

It doesn’t take much to loosen our stays, to unleash inhibitions.

Good food is an essential part of the formula but rarely the climactic apex as it might be for Italians or French, rather just one essential element of several and so it is best to glide over the SB menu and alight on the dishes that have fuelled my finest memories of Brazilian-led soirées; carnivorous cornucopia of Brazilian barbecue and what many call Brazil’s national dish, feijoada, a slow-cooked black bean stew, traditionally using cheaper cuts of meat.

SB’s mixed barbecue plate is the stuff of paleo dreams: chicken wrapped in bacon, thin strips of pork sausage, and excellent picanha steak and we wash it down, as you do, with Brazilian beer. (There are a few wines available but feel free to pick up a decent bottle of your own and pay very reasonable €10 corkage.)

And to gladden any Gael’s heart, the Brazilians are equally fond of multiple carbs on the same plate and ours arrive with crispy fries, fried cassava, potato salad, and rice.

Feijoada is reckoned by many to be Brazil’s ‘national dish’, and SB’s gourmet version featuring prime cuts is served up every Saturday as a weekly highpoint.

It is a gloopy, soupy primal swamp, a murky charcoal colour courtesy of the beans, with surprisingly few cooked-in herbed or spiced accents, flavours largely emanating from the meats (smoked sausage, pork belly, prime Irish beef), leading to a deep umami pulse that throbs almost entirely in the lower register.

With a bowl of rice, it is deeply comforting, impossible to resist. To rev up the dish, condiments arrive separately.

Farofa is the mother and father of these, pork pieces and garlic, fried with toasted cassava flour, to be liberally sprinkled over. (Farofa is also a pretty essential element in any Brazilian barbecue.)

For Irish palates more used to condiments (salt, pepper, oils, relishes, hot sauces, spices, herbs etc) designed to bring pronounced sensory enhancements, a gustatory jolt to throw the primary dish into sharper relief, farofa is a curiously muting, even hypnotic, experience as understated nutty maize-like flavours of cassava settle over all like a blanket of snow.

Further additions include slices of fresh orange, salsa, and crispy, crunchy pork crackling.

I’m a sucker for any combo of rice and beans/pulses, and feijoada is right up there with the best of them, although on any previous occasion I’ve had it, I like to play with another great Brazilian export crop — chillis.

With some of the most wallet-friendly dining prices in town, SB may not be the venue in which to dazzle your latest epicurean conquest, but it is a warm and lively spot.

The dynamic owner/operator Leonardo Lemos, a transplanted Brazilian soon to represent Ireland as an international triathlete, puts me in mind of certain of the great Irish publicans in London of yore who incorporated a whole new arm of social care and kindness for their clientele into more usual commercial activities, offering a home from home for the exiled, that strays well beyond the confines of the plate.

I subscribe to the theory that you can learn everything yet still know nothing until you go to that country and begin to eat.

I will eventually get to Brazil; meanwhile, SB will serve as a pre-flight departure lounge.

The Verdict