Gaucho Brazilian Barbecue: The Meat Eating Isn't Over Until You Say It Is

Gaucho Brazilian Barbecue is located at 100, 5920 Macleod Tr. S., 403-454-9119. 

Rodrigues is a gaucho (a Brazilian cowboy) chef from the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This southernmost corner of Brazil is populated by the descendants of Portuguese and Spanish colonists, native Guarani Indians and more recent Italian and German immigrants, all of whom have a fondness for meaty dishes.

When it came time for a harvest dinner on the area’s ranches during the state’s pioneering era, meat was first and foremost. Big slabs of beef would be roasted over open fires, and swords heavy with chunks of pork, lamb and poultry would be turned over the coals. Seasoned by salt and smoke, the meats were sliced onto plates and enjoyed by the gathered group. This traditional churrasco dining has given rise to churrascarias, or restaurants that that serve grilled meat, which have become popular around the world.

Rodrigues trained to be a gaucho chef in his home state and then worked with churrasco restaurants in Japan and China. Along the way, he picked up a fluency in Japanese and a working knowledge of Chinese to go along with his native Portuguese. And he also met a nice young lady — Rosina Aiello — who was studying in China. Of his many languages, English was not one. Regardless, Rodrigues and Aiello spoke Italian to one another and they soon came back to her native Calgary to be married in 2002.

Rodrigues went to work in a Tim Hortons, baking and working on his English. He moved into other jobs — including an unsuccessful stint as a casket salesman for a funeral home. One day, some friends asked him to cater an event in the churrasco style. The crowd loved it so much he received two more offers to cater, and then more offers followed.

In 2007, he moved his catering business into a small restaurant on Manchester Road S.E. and, in less than two years, outgrew it. He leased a larger space on the ground floor of Macleod Place near the corner of Macleod Trail and 58th Avenue S.E. and, a few months ago, opened a new, larger Gaucho.

The pride of the kitchen is a 64-skewer, gas-powered rodizio (rotisserie) barbecue that can be loaded with hundreds of pounds of meat: top sirloin (alcatra), rump steak (picanha), pork loin (lombinho), chicken wings (asa), leg of lamb (pema de carneiro), sausage (lingüiça), and so on. It’s big meat, but simply flavoured with salt — and sometimes garlic — and the smoky scent of the barbecue.

If you want to try them all, the $35 Cowboy Classic dinner offers 12 churrasco meats, plus as many trips to the cold and hot table as you’d like. (For the delicate diner, the $22 Sheriff’s Sampler lunch comes with a modest five meats.) This is not the most vegetarian-friendly place you’ll ever see. There are salads and such on the hot and cold table, but even the great Brazilian black bean stew called feijoada is laden with meat.

Gaucho’s decor reflects the meaty tones of the place, too. Done in carnivorous reds and browns, with an outline of a cow on one wall and a huge Longhorn head mounted on another, it looks like a meat-lover’s dream. But it’s not heavy and cloistered. Wood stencils on the south-facing windows beam sunlight in a pattern similar to the pine trees of Rio Grande do Sul, and wagon-wheel chandeliers are festooned with incandescent lights that brighten the room. Antique, glass-topped wooden shutters and doors double as tabletops, a huge photo of Rodrigues’s ancestors fills one wall and chunks of wood front the bar.

The room is enlivened by Rodrigues and his servers and their huge skewers of meat. With knives at the ready that would do well in any Zorro remake, the servers slice meat until you moan, “nao mais,” or you turn your green cow cut-out over to the red-and-beige side. 

It’s appropriate that the new space is on Macleod Trail, once a dusty trail used to drive cattle from down south to the packing plants in east Calgary, and that a cowboy — albeit a Brazilian one — has brought a different style of meat to Cowtown.

Gaucho Brazilian Barbecue is located at 100, 5920 Macleod Tr. S., 403-454-9119.