Green Field Churrascaria

Officially now on winter vacation, I am free of homework, exams, meetings, and all things academic. That of course means lots of time to do fun activities like dining out with friends and family, which is exactly what I have done. My brother also happens to be on break from medical school and my mom has a few weeks off from work, so we recently decided to have lunch at Green Field Churrascaria.

Green Field is a place I have been meaning to try for quite a while now. I think I first heard about it in the Boston Globe magazine, which had a feature covering many of the new restaurant openings around Massachusetts. As I have mentioned already in previous posts, I love buffets, so when I heard about the all-you-can-eat offering at Green Field, I was quite interested.

I love buffets but let’s face it – there are good buffet places and there are crappy buffet places. It’s not just about quantity – quality is important too. What interested me most about Green Field is not just the fact that it is a buffet. Green Field is a churrascaria, meaning that it’s a restaurant that specializes in serving meat – LOTS of it. I absolutely love meat, and to be honest, I think there is something very wrong with you if you don’t. That’s why I don’t really get along with vegetarians.

The main concept behind Green Field is the rodizio. The rodizio, which originated in the south of Brazil in the early 1800’s, is a method of serving grilled and barbequed meat. The idea is to serve a wide variety of different cuts of beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and sausage in succession to customers right at their table. Here’s a picture capturing some of the action…

In this picture are some roasted chicken and pieces of sirloin. Every couple of minutes the staff will roll up to your table with these huge skewers of meats and carve off onto your plate as much or as little as you can handle.

The meat just keeps coming and coming, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Well aware of this issue, Green Field fortunately provides the nice little signaling mechanism shown below. Green means “go” and red means “stop.” When your stomach needs a short rest break, you flip the cylinder so the red’s on top. Once you’re ready for more, flip it back over to the green side so the gluttonous meat-eating affair can resume.

In addition to all of the different meats that roll up tableside, Green Field also offers a number of traditional Brazilian dishes on the buffet. On the day that I visited, a few of the standouts were the braised oxtail, fried plantains, and some collard green/bean mixture – some are shown in the picture below. I found it kind of odd to find sushi at a churrascaria, but that was available as well. I didn’t try any though because after all, who really eats sushi at a Brazilian barbeque joint?

I enjoyed lunch at Green Field, and it matched my expectations. I wouldn’t say the food was the best I’ve ever had, but for $11.95 you can’t really complain. I hear Midwest Grill in Cambridge offers a more traditional, authentic experience, and the quality of meats is higher. I would definitely like to try that before going back to Green Field.