Ranajit Dam
HUAQIANGBEI'S Latin Grillhouse is unabashedly Brazilian; indeed it oozes Brazil in every sense. The windows of the restaurant are draped with the Brazilian colors yellow, green and blue. Screens inside show videos of women dressed as schoolgirls gyrating to samba music. There's even a real Brazilian waiter, teeth in braces, waltzing around and dropping off chunks of grilled meat at tables. In fact, the Brazilian message is pushed so chest-thumpingly that you half-expect some Brazilian celebrity -- Ricardo Kaka or Gisele Bundchen, say -- to stride out from among the gigantic national flags and the bottles of Brahma beer.
Dazzled by all this overwhelming Brazil-ness, your eyes might take some time to adjust, but when they do you'll realize that when it comes to value for money, few buffets in Shenzhen can even go close to matching it. I remember my first visit to a Brazilian barbecue restaurant well. We went to the one located below CITIC Plaza. The meat came around excruciatingly slowly -- but I suppose it had to be expected, for the restaurant was full -- but what irked me was that the buffet on the side was treated like it was being given away. Of the rather small selection of noodles, salads and poor excuses for desserts, very little was actually edible. So, while it is marketed as an all-you-can-eat place, it is closer to all-you-can-eat-before-you-run-out-of-patience place.
I have to admit I harbored the same trepidation with regard to Latin Grillhouse. Part of a Guangzhou-based chain with six outlets in Guangdong, the restaurant in Huaqiangbei is one of two in Shenzhen -- the other is in the Dongmen area -- and I was mentally loathing the idea of reviewing what I expected to see: a carbon copy of other Brazilian restaurants around the city. What I encountered, however, came as an extremely pleasant surprise.
Laid out on the buffet table at Latin Grillhouse was everything you could be looking for, and more: Think five kinds of soup, salads, rice and noodle dishes, cold meat, **cooked dishes, sushi, fruit and a wide range of desserts. And that, of course, was apart from the large portions of barbecued meat and vegetables that came by from time to time. The best part was that all of this cost us -- hold your breath right there -- just 48 yuan (US$6.7) per head, although we did use coupons offered at the door, which gave us a discount on the regular lunch price of 58 yuan per head. Dinner at Latin Grillhouse costs 88 yuan per head.
As for the food, it was far more than simply edible. Given my size and appetite, the sight of me marching back from the table with a heaped plate should not be that incongruous, but I must admit the size of the heap was a trifle embarrassing. I could not decide what to eat: The chicken salami or the cold duck breast; the Japanese soybean fish or the curried chicken filet? Sushi or no sushi? The options seemed endless; the permutations and combinations seemed mind-boggling. Perhaps it was best exemplified by the desserts. Normally I would have been happy to choose between fruit, egg caramel and souffle. The rich chocolate fondue made things rather difficult though.
