Brazilian friends wanted to take me to a place during my visit to São Paulo that would give me a…read morechance to sample some unique Brazilian flavours and they chose Micaela, partly due to its location (walking distance from my hotel) and due to our needing a place that would be open on Monday. Neither had been here before, but both had heard good things, so they figured it would be worth a shot. How right they were!
The restaurant is cute and charming inside, with a rustic sort of feel. The waiters--none of whom appear to speak English, though I cannot be sure of that since my friends handled all the interactions with staff--were friendly and helpful. The menu is extremely varied and includes many ingredients from all over Brazil, including exotic fishes from the north of the country, spices from the Amazon, and all sorts of things that none of us knew what they were.
We opted to share two starters, one called Aquarelas do Brasil (after the famous song of the same name) and the other "pintxos" of tapioca and shimeji mushrooms (mushrooms wrapped in tapioca pastry and fried). The Aquarelas dish turned out to be delivered on a plate resembling a painter's palette, with four little servings of things to be spread on thin pieces of a special bread that they make in-house (each serving a different colour, thus adding to the theme evoked by the dish's name). The tapioca-wrapped mushrooms was the better-tasting of the two dishes, though we enjoyed them both very much.
For the main course, I had a dish that consisted of beef, farofa, a fried noodle sort of thing on top and a tomato-and-onion salsa on the side, together with rice. It had excellent flavours, though the fried noodle-y thing on top made it a bit difficult to eat. We also had caiprinhas or caipiroskas, one of the latter made with red fruits instead of lime--there is a sizeable list of options for these cocktails on the menu--and they even gave us a taste of a special cachaça made with a Brazilian relative of the betel leaf.
We really didn't need dessert after all this, but we decided to share one among the three of us, choosing one made with toasted coconut, white chocolate caramel and something called puxurí that none of us was familiar with, so one of the waiters brought some out to show us. Turns out it's a spice from northern Brazil that is redolent of cinnamon and vanilla, and they gave me a piece to use at home. The dessert was excellent, as was the rest of the meal, and the price was pretty reasonable given all that we had ordered (R$140 each).
