Sabor Brasil

The average Brazilian tourist can only go so long without eating some decent beans, says Marcos Tadeu Baldini Gonçalves, the co-owner of the Kissimmee restaurant Sabor Brasil. When they’re looking for stewed black beans with smoked bacon, garlic, and bay leaves, they come to his restaurant, and they are not disappointed.

For the last eight years, Baldini and co-owner Thifani Vieira have made delicious Brazilian food from scratch. The space is small, tidy, and warmly lit, with plants and paintings scattered along the walls.

Baldini and Vieira bought Sabor Brasil, whose name means “Brazilian flavor,” from a friend, who had been cooking mediocre Brazilian food under the same name, often using canned products. Baldini and Vieira wanted to do something different: “When we bought the restaurant the proposal was to make real food,” Baldini says. “Fresh food and homemade food.” 

Most of Brasil’s clientele are Brazilians, either on vacation in Orlando or part of the large Brazilian community in Orlando and Kissimmee.

Vieira, the restaurant’s head chef, has a background in healthy, vegetable-forward cooking, and has operated restaurants in Brazil and the U.S. Sabor Brasil’s cooks use fresh ingredients wherever possible, sourcing some of it from local markets and some of it from their backyard garden. When making kibe, Brazilian fritters of Arab origin stuffed with ground meat, they pull green onions from out back.

This emphasis on freshness is characteristic of Brazilian cuisine, which leans on good ingredients and bold flavors that vary from dish to dish and region to region. A staple of the cuisine is the picanha, a cut of steak known as rump cap in the United States. It’s richly flavored with a thick cap of fat, and Sabor Brasil’s clientele gobble it up. Like many of the other dishes on the menu, it’s served with richly flavored rice and beans. Other popular dishes, like beef parmigiana and chicken stroganoff, nod to Brazil’s history of European immigration.

While homesick Brazilian tourists prefer simple staples, Brazilians who live in Kissimmee go to Sabor Brasil for specials they’d be less likely to make at home. Like many restaurants in Brazil, on Wednesdays Sabor Brasil serves feijoada, a bean stew with African roots that’s the national dish. The restaurant smokes its own meat before simmering it with beans, kale, and rice.

On Fridays, they serve another dish of African origin, the Northern Brazilian mocequa de camaraos, a creamy shrimp stew made with coconut milk and red palm oil. 

Sabor Brasil imports rice and beans—two staples of the cuisine—from Brazil, and Baldini says the taste and texture are worth it. They also import codfish balls from Portugal.

Their customers appreciate the dedication to creating a pocket of Brazil in Kissimmee.

“We had one customer, she starts to cry when she try our steak,” Baldini says. “And she starts to cry because she remembers the food that she used to eat with her grandma.”

“We feel proud of that,” he adds.