Sophie had never been to Fazenda. On paper I don’t think of it as a ‘Sophie style’ restaurant. My wife doesn’t like choice. Well not this much choice. She likes places where she goes for dinner, I choose the wine, she chooses her cocktail. She tells them she doesn’t eat pigs or tentacles or bambi, scours to see if they have crab or lobster, and then waits to see what turns up. She’ll probably be too full for dessert but not full enough to turn down the suggestion of another bottle of wine. The very idea of a restaurant where she either accepts or declines huge cuts of meat at the tableside is a lot for her to process. Throw in a market table where she can choose from seven different cheeses, five types of chillies, breads, seemingly a thousand salads, and what you have is the potential for a breakdown.
It’s a good job that she didn’t see the market table before we ordered the empanadas or else we may have missed out on one of the great snacks in Birmingham. It’s the Argentine pasty – or pastaso, if you like – filled with wagyu mince, chopped egg, onions, and peppers. Seriously, two or these and a big glass of malbec in the bar are going to become my quick dinner choice for under twenty quid from now on; so good I contemplated ordering a second portion so I didn’t have to share. We have these with excellent cocktails and a bottle of the house red from Catena that’s up there with the great house reds. I digress, but having one of the great producers of Malbec produce a bottle just for you is nothing short of a masterstroke. Then, a quick trip to the market table shows how very different our tastes can be; Sophie’s a healthy plate of legumes, pulses, and leaves, mine all of the chillies, most of the cheeses, a blob of hummus and a pile of salt. They have the tiny little chillies from the rainforest in Colombia. Those bastards get me every time.
Sophie has the moqueca, because she likes moqueca, which is fine by me because I have never eaten moqueca. I’m guessing it’s relatively new to the menu, along with the tuna steak, the truffle risotto and other things you might want to order if lots of meat isn’t your thing. In principle it’s a seafood stew, though really anything but. Generous pieces of cod, prawns, and mussels, all accurately cooked, into which a veloute-like sauce of tomato, coconut and chilli is poured. It’s rich, and I don’t know what the tapioca crackers are adding, but it goes down a storm.
I get the indulgent churrasco experience which isn’t cheap at £76 but has the full tableside meat bulked-out with a lobster tail soaked (maybe poached) in a full-on garlic butter. That lobster probably wasn’t needed, but was absolutely enjoyed, and well worth the extra twenty quid. And as always, the meats are very good in general, with the red meats better than the lighter ones and the beef standing out. Nobody does pinchana as well as here, not in Birmingham anyway, and the rump of aged beef was every bit as good as that. The chicken thighs were a bit ‘meh’, however the pork which tasted akin to char sui was really very good, and the lamb was Sophie’s pick of the bunch (she wasn’t supposed to get any of the tableside cuts, but we’ll forget I ever said that). There are fries that end up in the garlic butter with the lobster, and truly excellent feijoada that is as much an ode to wobbly piggy bits as they are to black beans.
Service was excellent throughout and Anthony is a bonafide superstar. With the upgraded churrasco, the moqueca, empanadas, the bottle of red, and four cocktails, the bill is £260 for two, but you could halve that with less indulgent choices. I have a soft spot for Fazenda, I’ve enjoyed them since they came to Birmingham and I’ve made choices to go to some of their other sites around the country. They just get it. The food, the wine, and the service. With a spate of similar openings close by it is too easy to forget the quality that they bring and the style in which they do it.
9/10
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