CARNAVAL Brazilian
BBQ
R3B 0G5
204-505-0945
Twitter: @CarnavalWpg
I love the idea of putting a high-draw restaurant at this
location. Waterfront Drive finds new
life with the recent condominium developments, and now the area needs some
retail, bars and restaurants to liven it up.
Hermanos has been around for a few years and consistently produces good
food—I’m happy to hear the owners expand their territory onto Waterfront with
Carnaval Brazilian BBQ.
You can’t miss the colourful sign adorning the façade but
the milieu inside looks surprisingly stark and colourless. The full length windows provide a lovely view
of the riverside but if you’re not fortunate enough to get a viewing seat, the
remainder of the area provides a nice look at the meat-loaded swords over
flames.
While I’ve experienced gaucho meat service throughout Europe ,
my best benchmarking comes from the prolific American chain Fogo de Chao. Fogo ensures that the diners suffer through
meat sweats while gorging on the tender and delicious variety of sword-impaled
foods.
Similar to Fogo, Carnaval provides you with a round card,
green on one side and red on the other.
Green indicates carnivorous hunger, please bring meat, and red means “no
mas,” my heart’s taken enough of a meat beating. Alas, that’s where the similarity to its
American cousin ends.
Having booked reservations two months in advance, we
expected to have a prime spot for a leisurely evening of gluttony. We are surprised to find that they limit the
seating to two hours to make way for a second sitting. Two hours of power-eating meat sounds like a
gastronomic disaster but our carnivorous clan prepares for the challenge. Sadly, we sat for no less than 15 minutes
with no server in sight. Even after our
server comes to open the floodgates, the swordsfolks appear few and
far-in-between. There seems to be a lot
of activity but no one’s stopping by. I
wonder if the servers are told to flit aimlessly intentionally. If you’re going to limit the amount of time I
have to eat, you should provide the food in a steady stream; this seemed more
like a trickle than a stream. Worse,
what dripped through the trickle fell far short of expectations.
The first gaucho to arrive presented us with pork sausage,
which tastes nicely flavoured and cooked well.
Next comes the lamb leg gaucho, which again is cooked well and has nice
flavours. Most of the steak selections
come well cooked (not well-done, meaning there’s still plenty of pink in the
meat); however, the tenderloin looks forlornly flamed to death with nary any
pink to be seen. It’s a real shame that
their most tender cut of meat is the one that’s overcooked.
I change my mind. The
next round of steak cuts all come overcooked and juiceless. The preparation here is very
questionable—just because your first order tasted delicious, there’s no
guarantee it will come back that way.
The return of the sausage found round two very salty and not nearly as
balanced as our first skewer. Similarly,
the second round of lamb falls far short of the first round. This lamb sample tastes well enough but the
meat is tough-tough-tough. The same
inconsistency applies to the chicken wings.
Our first encounter with wings finds them cooked well, tasty and nicely
sized; the second batch arrives burnt and shrivelled like a prune. The bacon-wrapped chicken isn’t burnt but
cooked to death.
At this point, I should take a minute to describe cooking
terms as it applies to grilling meats.
Doneness refers to degree of cookness and describes how much temperature
the meat sees. Rare steaks see 130-140F
and well-done steaks experience at least 170F.
Searing refers only to the amount of heat applied to the outside of the
meat—too much searing results in burnt foods and too little searing results in
bland foods. You want lots of searing
because the heat caramelises the sugars and the resulting smoke adds depth. You can have burnt meat that’s still
undercooked, or overcooked meat that’s pasty.
For more on perfect grilling, have a look here. To add to the confusion, there’s also
blackened, which is very different than burnt.
Blackened meats are heavily seasoned and only show a hint of blackness,
usually as a result of very high heat.
Here at Carnaval, you roll the dice for your degree of doneness, searing
and blackness.
While the methods of applying heat are questionable,
fortunately, the cooks are adept at seasoning, spicing and herbing. Most of the steaks wear a nice layer of
herbs, which always adds a dimension to meats.
Warning: do not sear or blacken
herbed meats; herbs burn very quickly leaving you with ashes to ashes and dust
to dust.
The herbaceousness carries through to the sides and
accompaniments. The mashed potatoes come
with a deliciously herbed dip. The
skinny fries and the yam/fries combo are both delicious as well, which doesn’t
say much when the starch outshines the meat dishes at a steak restaurant. Speaking of outshine, dessert for me arrives
with the skewered, grilled pineapples.
Dusted with cinnamon and brown sugar, some of our party describe this as
the best dish on the menu.
When the non-meat items make up some of the best dishes in
your meat-based restaurant, you have some problems. Carnaval needs to iron out many of their cooking
issues, as well as their serving issues.
When people pay $44 for all-you-can-eat meat, the carnivores want
caveperson kinds of meat-eating. If you
insist on imposing a two-hour limit, your gauchos better be on the spot every
time my card turns green. As a final
complaint, our dinner plates were never switched out once through our
dinner. Chicken bones piled up like a
like a pet cemetery and eventually, you run out of room to eat—that’s provided
that you eat all your fat and grizzle or you have another pile of meat discards. These are all subtle hints but when you add
up mounds of subtleties, you end up with a mountain of slaps in the face
telling you to stop eating. Carnaval
needs to learn a few lessons from its American cousin before I’d send people
here—but I hope they get it right soon.
I still think this restaurant is a great fit for the area and I hope
they succeed.
Roll the clock a few months later. Through various sources, the service and
attention is a lot better when they’re not full to the rafters. However, as a timed restaurant, you need to
maintain your service, regardless of customer volume. In a city loaded with great restaurants, you
need to ensure that the customer’s every experience is a great one.
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** /5
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