Brazilian Cocktails, Peruvian Seafood, and Cuban Art
A Global Evening in the Walkable City
Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chão is known for its flame roasted meats, paraded through the main dining hall and sliced onto patrons’ plates. It also offers an all-day happy hour, both at the downstairs bar and at their upstairs lounge. Here, the star is the Caipirnha ($10), the national cocktail of Brazil, which literally translates as “little rural person” in Brazilian Portuguese. Think “little hillbilly.”
We started our evening with a pair of these popular drinks, which are made with cachaça (distilled from Brazilian sugarcane juice), sugar, and lime. They were sweet, tart, and refreshing, with a kind of earthy herbal taste reflecting its green color. Fogo serves variations (with passion fruit or strawberries) but we stayed with the basic, in the cozy downstairs bar that lets you look on the adjacent crowd of carnivores.
From there we walked to another restaurant housed in the main north tower of The Plaza Coral Gables: CVI.CHE 105. It’s the flagship of this regional chain, with a stunning, cavernous interior that feels like a Hollywood movie set. The walls are adorned with back-lit photos of green scaled fish, blue mermen, and Peruvian warriors, the interior columns illuminated purple with gold trim hanging from the ceiling. Over the entrance to the kitchen is a sign of lightbulbs that reads “SHOWTIME.” That says it all, from waiters with vests emblazoned with tropical flora to the DJ ensconced with a high-tech console just off the entrance. The whole scene is larger than life.
Left: Caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil at Fogo de Chão
Right: Pargo Caribeño – fried snapper and crispy shrimp at CVI.CHE 105
The menu is rich with seafood, and we settled on two: Pargo Caribeño, a whole deboned snapper fried in chunks, paired with crispy shrimp and laced with leche de tigre tartar. Crunchy and satisfying, with a nice burst of sharp flavor. We also tried the Ceviche Da Vinci, scallops dressed in a rainbow of pepper sauces, as appealing to the eye as it is to the tongue.
After a coffee to perk us up, we walked to the entertainment part of the evening, a visit to the Cernuda Arte gallery. We strolled first through The Plaza courtyard, with its lit-up fountains and public art on display, and then two blocks south on Ponce de Leon.
Every other first Friday of the month (the next being Nov. 7), proprietor Ramon Cernuda puts on what in olden times you’d call a salon. On display (now in two main buildings, each with a second floor), Cernuda puts together a themed show with paintings and sculptures by leading Cuban artists from today and yesterday. One month it will be contemporary Cuban artists, another Cuban surrealism; on the Friday we attended, the theme was “Modern Art in 1940s Cuba,” and all the greats were there: Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Mario Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, and others. All are artists who were part of the Vanguardia movement, which drew global attention through the 1944 exhibition “Modern Cuban Painters” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
These evenings at Cernuda, which run from 6 to 9 pm, are pleasant, elegant affairs, usually with live music provided by a keyboard player, along with wine and soda. And, of course, the maestro himself, Ramon Cernuda (with wife Nercys Ganem) is there to answer questions and educate. The paintings looked better with each glass of wine, a fine end to another night on the town in global Coral Gables.
Read our previous “Night on the Town” feature for more on Coral Gables’ dining, art, and nightlife.