33 West 36th Street

                                                                             212-763-7123

                                                                    By John Mariani

                                                                                     Pão de Queijo

 

         Until recently, the dominant style of Brazilian restaurants in New York has been that of the national chain Fogo de Chão steakhouses, with scores of branches from here to Dubai. They’re a lot of fun, with churrasco meats carved tableside and an enormous condiments and salad bar to choose from. But that festive style barely hints at what Brazilian cuisine is all about, and, fortunately, the Brazilian community in New York supports those restaurants that remind them of home, not least across Thirty-Sixth Street, where they abound.

         The finest example I know of is Berimbau Brazilian Kitchen, which opened small in 2009 in the West Village and has now expanded measurably to midtown with a larger Caipirinha Bar. Owner Mario de Matos is on a mission to spread the gospel of regional Brazilian cuisine as prepared by chef Victor Vasconcellos with a cookery that derives from European, Amerindian, African and Asian influences that have been spread throughout Brazil’s vast geography, from Amazonia, Minas Gerais, Rio and Bahia.
         The design, of course, evokes Brazil’s rain forests with natural wood and greenery, and the floor mimics Rio de Janeiro’s famous boardwalk with its wavy colored pattern. The artwork is similar to the tropical ambience of Brazil’s open-air museum Instituto Ihotim, while the ceiling is spread with fishing ropes. There is also a private dining room, and later this year there will be a bossa nova jazz club. The Brazilian music in the dining room is played so it is never intrusive.
         Begin with one of those Caipirinha cocktails, like the Rabo de Galo, made with aged cachaça, Cynar, sweet vermouth and orange bitters. The wine list, curiously, lacks any Brazilian bottlings, this, at a time when the country’s wine industry is soaring, but they do stock many good wines from Argentina and Chile to be enjoyed with this food.  Otherwise there is the bestselling Brazilian beer called Brahma Chop.
         No one does cheese bread better than the Brazilians, who use parmesan and farmer’s cheese to incorporate into tapioca flour to produce a puff ball called pão de queijo with a crispy outside and a hot, chewy, oozy inside ($10), with which you get a trio of condiments. Brazilian empanadas are oblong puff pastries filled with various ingredients ($13), and dadinho are little pop-in-the-mouth cubes of tapioca, coalho cheese and sweet and sour peppers ($14). Coxinha  are a wonderful variation on fried chicken, the pieces filled with soft Catupiri cheese on a spoon ($11). There is also a plate of passarinho fried chicken wings with sweet and sour pepper sauce ($18).
         Tomato and coconut milk enrich and suffuse velvety mussels with Bell peppers and a broth dashed with red palm oil called dendé ($19), and a national seafood dish called moqueca teems with bountiful morsels of the day’s fish, shrimp, calamari and that same peppery broth ($36). I loved the addition of pomegranate and sumac salad to a fried whole branzino ($38). Polvo is octopus, served with smoked eggplant, white beans, tangerine, sweet chili pepper and purslane ($21).
         The national dish of Brazil is feijoada, dark as coffee, chockful of parts of smoked pig with bitter collard greens and black beans in the stew, accompanied by white rice and bacon-flecked farofa made from toasted cassava flour ($34) that easily serves two or more.  
         Of course, there’s beef, which Brazilians consume the way Italians do pasta on an everyday basis. The picanha cut, similar to a bottom loin, is brought to a table and sliced by the chef into rosy slabs, served with an abundance of mixed greens, chili crunch broccolini, rice, beans , French fries and farofa with cheeses ($69 for two, but three or four can enjoy this hefty main dish).
        

There’s a very rich dulce de leche caramel flan called pudim ($12) and a lovely passion fruit mousse de marcujá ($10).
         You could easily make a meal of the appetizers alone, but not to try the feijoada and moqueca and miss the superior beef is to miss a great education in Brazil’s wide-ranging food culture, where people say, “Não reclame de barriga cheia”—never complain on a full belly.
         Incidentally, located off the main hallway is a pop-up retail space showcasing Latino and Brazilian brands, as well as a marvelous jeweler in gold and silver named BARBOSA owned by Brazilian-born Jackie Barbosa.
 


Berimbau Kitchen is open nightly.

 

 

      “The story has to be about the Magdalene Laundries,” said Katie on the red-eye flight back to New York. “Even if there’ve been some stories in Irish or Canadian papers, the story’s still fresh, and that stuff about the unmarked graves is astonishing. That alone should be enough to titillate Dobell.”
         “I’ll trust your instincts on that, Katie, “ said David, “but looks like you have some preliminary research to do before you tell Alan.”
         “Oh, yeah, and I know just where to start.”
         “Let me guess: Your old professor at Fordham.”
         “Exactly.”
         David was referring to Katie’s history professor at her alma mater, Karl Mundt, who had been invaluable with her research on her prior investigative articles. A distinguished professor of Modern European History, Mundt had over many decades established a broad worldwide network of scholars and authorities in myriad fields of study, so if he could not shed light on Irish Catholic history and the Magdalene Laundries, he would know who could.
         Katie called Mundt, who was always happy to hear from one of his prize students—he’d always hoped Katie would get her PhD and become a professor.  After learning the reason for her wanting to see him, Mundt said he had little expertise in Irish Catholicism but knew exactly whom to call on to join them, then said she could come over the following morning if she liked, around ten-thirty.
         It was a beautiful, warm morning, and the Fordham campus revived in Katie the affection she had for her college years and how close she and Joseph Evangelista were in those days, when he committed to joining the priesthood as a Jesuit, she not quite knowing if she’d go to graduate school in History or Journalism.
     Katie loved the slightly musty smell of the classrooms and offices where Mundt spent so much of his long career. David, who had been along the last three times Katie had visited, still felt as an outsider but appreciated how Mundt had shown him such deference as a NYPD cop, especially when David’s questions led to insights even the professor had not seen.
         Mundt looked little different than when Katie had seen him a year before, as always dressed in a buttoned three-piece suit and bow tie, his hair slicked back, his abundant eyebrows providing gravitas when needed and levity when called for.
         “Katie, Katie, Katie!” exclaimed the professor. “I get older, you get younger.”
         Katie said, “Perhaps your eyesight is not what it once was,” then thought that might have been taken the wrong way.
 Mundt warmly welcomed David, told them to sit down and offered something to drink, then asked for more information on why Katie had come to ask his assistance.
         “I really know nothing about these Magdalene Laundries,” he said in a faint German accent, “but I know how intimately the Irish Church was connected to the Irish government.  It was a symbiotic union that gave them strength in the face of British domination well into the twentieth century. The British knew they could control the Irish politicians but they had little sway over the clergy, even after the famine of the 1840s starved millions of Irish to death. The lucky ones, of course, emigrated to America, and just about everything on this campus is named after Irish bishops or prominent Irish-American entrepreneurs.”
         Indeed, the Fordham campus buildings were flush with Irish names—Murphy, Keating, Mulcahy, Walsh, O’Hare, Larkin, Finley. In fact, one of the only campus structures with a non-Irish honorees was the Lombardi Memorial Center, named after the beloved Italian-America football coach Vince Lombardi.  One complex was named Martyrs Court, after three 17th century French Jesuit martyrs tortured to death by the Mohawk tribe.
         Mundt said that he had asked another history professor, Father Raymond Porter, a Jesuit, to join them. “He’s our resident Irish history scholar, and I told him you wanted to discuss the Magdalene Laundries.” At that moment a robust, corpulent figure in his fifties entered the office, dressed in a tweed jacket and chino pants, without a clerical collar.
         Introductions were made and Katie said, “You may not remember me, Father—” but was cut off by Porter, who had a slight Irish brogue, saying, “Oh, Katie, I remember you very well. You were in at least two of my courses, and Karl speaks of you often and how proud he is of your success. All of Fordham is, really.”
         Katie blushed, David smiled broadly and said, “You can include me, too.”
         “So,” Porter went on, “Karl tells me you’re interested in knowing more about the Magdalene asylums? Terrible, terrible part of Irish Catholic history. They started out well enough, as rescue missions for prostitutes, orphans and women with nowhere to live, but they later devolved into sweatshop laundries that offered little access to the outside world and no way for the women to get out. The last one shut down just a few years ago.”
         “When did they actually begin?” asked David, taking notes.
         “The first of the nuns’ convents was opened in Caen in 1641 and was called the Refuge of Our Lady of Charity. By the time of the French Revolution there were seven communities in France—not a good time to be a nun—so they spread out around the world, including in Ireland. As recently as 1960 about 1,500 sisters served in forty-four communities in ten countries. Various orders of nuns operated them, for profit, by the way, under the auspices of the government and Church that funded them. The principal order, especially in Dublin, was the Convent of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, who came to the city during the great famine, about 1853, I believe."
         “I know,” said Porter, “their name would suggest they would have acted in the most benevolent spirit of Jesus and Mary, and they may well have at the beginning. You have to understand that without such institutions there simply was no support system for destitute women tossed out on the streets, from alcoholic families, many of them raped and pregnant.  The asylums were protective organizations at a time when women had no rights whatsoever under the law, and any woman tainted by sexuality was considered a criminal. The asylums were alternatives to prisons and workhouses.”
         While listening, David was reminded that he’d spent his career going after Mafia mobsters whose antecedents in Sicily had once been the only protection the impoverished populace had against foreign occupiers like the Spanish and French.  Back then the people in power were the ones who would be murdered by the Mafia, which the foreigners feared mightily. Only when Sicilians began emigrating to the United States in the 1880s did the Mafia flourish in a new land of unbridled opportunity. Sadly, the Mafia’s intimidation of their own people soon replaced the domination once employed by foreign powers back in Sicily a century before. David also knew that one of the Mafia’s major profit-making industries was prostitution.  In America, however, a young Italian woman could avoid such a fate by joining a convent, where they would be protected by the Church.