Pak Abu's Birthday Dinner

Nawwar and June (in red) hamming it up for the camera. Note the Mardi Gras paintings on the wall.


Pak Abu and Ann looking apprehensive. Must be the oversized knife. Looks more like a machete! On the skewer is Picanha beef cut ready for serving.

Pak Abu with his solitary candle nestling amidst caramelised bananas and vanilla ice cream.

It has been quite a while since I consumed a lot of meat at one sitting (eating 'satay' morsels doesn't count). I am speaking a whole range of red and white meats; roasted, grilled and barbequed.

Frankly, I am not a meat person. I love all kinds of seafood, with the exception of fish. Give me lobster, prawn, squid, crab, oyster, calamari and abalone anytime, washed down with any mint-flavoured lemony lime thirst quenchers, and I'm all yours.

Pak Abu on the other hand is big on chicken and loves meat, so off to Carnaval Churrascaria in Damansara Jaya we trooped for dinner earlier this evening to give him a treat well deserved, it being his 57th birthday today.

A bit of trivia: A churrascaria is a Brazilian or Portuguese steakhouse. Churrasco is a cooking style; roughly translated, it is Portuguese for 'barbeque'. It owes its origins to the fireside roasts of the gauchos of Pampas.

In modern restaurants, the 'rodizio' service is typically offered, In this, 'passadors' (meat waiters) come to your table with knives and a skewer, on which are speared various kinds of meats, be it beef, fillet mignon, lamb, chicken, duck, turkey ham, sausages, fish, as well as grilled pineapple and bread smothered in sour cream.

Carnaval Churrascaria is one such Brazilian restaurant in Petaling Jaya. It is located at the endlot of a row of shophouses (next to Maybank) just metres away from The Atria in Damansara Jaya.

The eatery, decked out in Brazilian national colours of yellow and green, looked bright and cheerful. Two flags - Brazilian and Malaysian - shared space behind the bar while paintings of the Mardi Gras, in a riot of colours, adorned the walls.

Pak Abu had eaten there once before a couple of years ago, with a group of corporate head honchos and avid golfers, and had spoken highly of it. So I decided it would be nice to surprise him with another 'churrasco' dinner.

The salad bar was filled to the brim. There must have been about 20 varieties to choose from, ranging from Thai-style glass noodles to fusilli, cole-slaw, green salad, potato salad, kidney beans, diced tomatoes in garlic and basil, fried aubergine slices, wedges, boiled ladies fingers with sambal....

The meats, tender and juicy, kept coming every so often that we eventually had to tell them to halt the conveyor belt of skewer-bearing passadors.

My favourite meat (the real thing, not the Brazilian passador although he was quite a looker himself.. hehehe.. ) was the lamb slices, eaten with mint sauce prepared from scratch, with fresh mint leaves.

For the customary candle-blowing, we decided to stay away from a cake; it's far too rich for Pak Abu who is a recent diabetic. I had wanted to get him his favourite (and less calorie-laden) tiramisu cake, but they didn't have it at the bakery I went to earlier in the day.

The restaurant instead prepared its specialty, caramelised bananas with three humongous scoops of vanilla ice cream, and stuck a candle in the middle of the dish. Still indecently rich, but not as bad as a royal icing overload on a normal birthday cake.

All considered, it was good night out for the family, our 'last kopek' really, before Ramadhan...