Vento Haragano

São Paulo, Brazil

Vento Haragano opened in 1993 with the goal of bringing gaúcho churrasco to the centre of São Paulo. The name references the wind that fans the coals in Rio Grande do Sul, and the room plays the theme: waitstaff in traditional bombacha trousers and berets, wooden walls hung with leather tack and southern motifs, a dining room that seats several hundred without losing the sense of occasion. The restaurant sits a few blocks from Avenida Paulista in Jardim Paulista and draws a mixed crowd of families, office groups, and tourists who have heard that this is where the rodízio format is taken seriously. Linguiça toscana on a long metal skewer is one of the first cuts that circulates from the grill: the fresh pork sausage comes out blistered from the charcoal, split open at the skin, and is sliced at the table. It arrives before the picanha, before the fraldinha, as a signal that the grill is ready and the meal is beginning. The salad bar is extensive and includes farofa, vinagrete, and pickled vegetables. Reservations are advisable on weekends.

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Sausages served here

Linguiça

São Paulo & Southeast Brazil

Linguiça is a pork sausage with deep roots in Portuguese cuisine that became, through centuries of use in Brazil, one of the essential components of the Brazilian table. It arrives in two distinct everyday forms. Calabresa is the smoked version: cured, dried, heavy with sweet paprika and garlic, sliced into coins and thrown onto the grill or into the frying pan. Toscana is fresh and unsmoked, seasoned with fennel seed and black pepper in the Italian-immigrant tradition of São Paulo's interior. Both show up at the churrasco, Brazil's communal grilling tradition, where linguiça on skewers over charcoal is as expected as picanha. The calabresa half coils in dozens of supermarket refrigerators across the country, and the toscana sweats in butcher cases from the coffee-growing highlands around Campinas to the gaúcho plains of Rio Grande do Sul. Neither style is delicate food. Both are built for fire, fat, and sharing.

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