A place to meat and greet

I took a lunch meeting with a Hollywood confidante in May 2005

We talked pictures, and we talked meat. Meat, meat, and more meat.

Tri-tip. Pepper steak. Garlic steak. Beef kabob. Top sirloin.

It’s ( nearly) each about meat when you ’re at Amazon Churrascaria in Fullerton (in Orange County,Calif.). Churrascaria is a particularly Brazilian blend of regale and steakhouse, featuring waitpersons who bat the room bearing brand- length skewers, each loaded with a knob of meat, still storming hot from the open- honey caff partake into the kitchen.

Brazilian traces extend to the scenery. A cascade cascades down a wall facing the frontal door. Dummy jungle shops and crypto jungle- ruin panels cover the walls. It made me suppose of the sprat-favorite Rainforest Cafe chain, sans roaring animatronics, flashing lights, and commercial- eaterymega-merchandising.

A curious touch of the American Midwest dominates the middle of the large eatery, which has served in former lives as a Chinese buffet and a Country Inn buffet. A salad bar of feathers, the kind popular in Peoria in the ’80s, harbors mayo- grounded salads, three- bean salads, inelegant chuck, some mists. And in one corner, the veritably Brazilian treat of banana frita ripe banana strips rolled in cinnamon- seasoned flour, deep-fried and carpeted with sugar. Delicious.

Returning to your cell, it’s enough introductory. Red oilcloth- covered tables, well-worn water glasses, a shortlist of Chilean table wines, and the guys bringing the meat. As long as you keep a little tabletop red-unheroic-and-green spindle turned green- side up, they keep sculpturing. It’s all you can eat, for as long as you can eat. ( Put the spindle red side over and it means stop, formerly! Sideways means bring the bill.)

For lunch ($12.75), the chow generally is limited — if you can call it that — to a dozen cuts of beef, pork link, giant funk hams, and lemon cells wrapped in bacon.

At regale ($21.75), the choices expand to 22 different types of meat. All the beef you can get at lunch, plus skirt steak, succulent beef and pork caricatures, ribeye, angel. There’s roasted salmon. And now the exotics come by. Alligator, duck, quail, funk heart.

The aroma of hoarse meat fills the room, and depending on your sensibilities, it's either tasteful or overwhelming.

None of it should come as a surprise. You know what you ’re getting the nanosecond you pull into the parking lot.

One of those big print banners hangs on the surface wall facing the parking lot. A smiling meat garçon manhandles a loaded skewer. A dozen other full skewers impend coming to him. Regale smells, richer than anything that wafts over your vicinity hedge, fill the air.

My confidante (who introduced me to this place that we ’ve come to call “ that meat palace” while we were each in our Atkins Diet phase) and I liked the smell outdoors and by. My woman, who joined me for a Saturday- night mess, was forcefully in the overpowered camp.

She liked the skirt steak and the ribeye, but six or seven servings of different flesh latterly, she was full and ready to go. She awaited patiently for me to work through the beef caricature — as beautiful as any high caricature I ’ve had — the quail, the alligator, the rabbit, the pork.

For her tolerance, she awarded herself with a chocolate cheesecake served from a rolling wain by Jessica, the “ cate girl” — another curious Midwestern touch — and we resolve a pineapple sorbet that was a perfect cap to my gorging light, delicate, cold and served in a hollowed-out pineapple cocoon.

Restaurant director Roman Alcaraz says they ’ve erected a pious following, among area Brazilians to be sure — maybe it’s the caipirinha amalgamations, a kind of Brazilian margarita made with cachaca, a type of Brazilian rum — but also from the full melange of Orange County’s numerous emigrants, be they Asian, Latin or Illinoisan.

Proprietor Kent Choy, a CPA in Los Angeles’Koreatown, got the idea for Amazon from a customer, and in December 2002 it opened as the only one of its kind by Orange County. A many churrascarias serve Los Angeles County, and the staff in Fullerton hears rumors of a contender coming to Irvine.

But for now, it’s a singular kind of experience, a great place to meet a confidante.