I recently had a successful brunch date at Café Do Brasil, 440 N.W. 11th—successful in that, when she excused herself to use the restroom, she didn’t make a run for it through the kitchen’s backdoor—and, even though I am, for the most part, against the aging hipster ritual of weekend brunch, it was a beautiful afternoon for it, even if the reservations I made (to impress her, natch) were mostly not necessary.
As we were led to our seats, I was strangely taken aback by how much space there is in the main dining room; for most of my visits to Café Do Brasil over the years, many of them had been upstairs, in their swank bar that overlooks Midtown which, at dusk, is something truly romantic to gaze at and even more so when you actually have someone to gaze at it with.
Or so I’ve been told.
With poppy Portuguese-language tunes playing on the sound-system overhead, we made the most awkward of small talk in-between looking over Café Do Brasil’s precise menu; I settled on the cuisine exotica of Brazil’s national dish, the Feijoada Brasileira ($12.00), which I embarrassingly mangled the pronunciation of. She ordered a choice Brazilian breakfast, the easily-pronounceable Favorito ($13.00).