Tuna tartare with tomato and black olive in a pistou sauce
What they give you when you arrive atLe Pré Catelan is something one part menu, four parts encyclopaedia: the Amazonian cuisine in which the restaurant specialises is full of ingredients unique to Brazil, from fruits to fishes, spices to starchy veg, and to help you navigate, the menu contains pictures and thumbnail biographies of the more unusual ingredients. It’s not quite as bizarre as going to a Michelin-starred restaurant and being presented with pictures of the best dishes on a laminated sheet so that you don’t have to attempt the names – but it’s certainly unusual.
Scrutinising this encyclopaedia of mandioquinha (a potato-like tuberous root), tucupi (whose write-up includes the eye-catching phrase “poisonous hydrogen cyanide”) and caju (cashew to you, but not the cashew you knew – more on this later) serves to distract the diner’s attention from his surroundings, which might be for the best. Addended to the vast Sofitel Rio de Janeiro Copacabana, Le Pré Catelan is the last word in bland hotel restaurant – all cod Starck Ghost chairs and coloured lighting struggling to lend the room some of the atmosphere it’s sorely lacking. Curtains are drawn over the tall windows, saving you from the potential distractions occasioned by the body-beautiful disporting themselves on Copacabana Beach, directly opposite.
Even in shaved-ice form, it absorbs all the moisture from your mouth, leaving you feeling you’ve been served a sort of anaesthetic cotton wool sorbet
To the menu, instead: the restaurant serves an eight course-tasting menu, interspersed with sorbets of occasionally rather dubiously refreshing qualities. Each dish includes at least one of these uniquely Brazilian ingredients – you consult the menu throughout, parsing the flavours in your mouth, variously sharp-sweet and deeply umami-savoury.
Some of these constituents, like an ice cream of açaí, a cherry that tastes as if it’s been rolled in dark chocolate, or a skate-like slab of tambaqui fish accompanied by a wondrous smoked-potato mandioquinha mousse, are immediate winners. Others, one might charitably describe as an acquired taste. A concluding sorbet flavoured with caju threw me quite off guard: these were not the cashews I know, love and eat by the handful at home, but a fruit; the “nut” I’m familiar with proves to be merely its stem. The caju fruit has a distinctive and unlovely flavour and a uniquely dehydrating property: even in shaved-ice form, it absorbs all the moisture from your mouth, leaving you feeling you’ve been served a sort of anaesthetic cotton wool sorbet, faintly apple-flavoured. (The cashew “nut” does get a look-in, as crust on another excellent piece of fish, the meaty white pirarucu.) A mid-meal sorbet of a fruit named murici smells like a well-aged cheese and, again, is less refreshing than one might wish of a granité.
Moqueca blinis and grilled shrimp with Brazilian nut cream
Le Pré Catelan was one of my first stops on my first visit to Brazil, and it was instructive to learn with hindsight how many traditional Brazilian staples the restaurant had given a twist. Acai is omnipresent, as a compote on breakfast buffets; moqueca, a sweetly tomatoey fish stew reminiscent of a less spicy tom yam soup, appears here on blinis to accompany grilled shrimps. Other items, regrettably, never recurred on my trip; the pirarucu fish was not to be found again, a great shame, as the combination of its almost blandly meaty, succulent texture with the two sauces it’s served with – tucupi, and a jambu sauce which yields a menthol tingle that persists, not unpleasantly, through the ensuing two courses – was one of the highlights of this meal. The other, an ox cutlet perfectly cooked and served with toasted manioc (tapioca) flour and something which resembles, joyously, an enormous potato croquette stuffed with bacon and vegetables, is more familiar, a Brazilian take on a straightforward comfort food.
You conclude the meal feeling not offended by the bland environment – rather, after Le Pré Catelan’s succession of unfamiliar flavours and the oddly pleasing fact of having a “crib sheet” on hand to refer to, you understand that this is a restaurant justifiably confident enough in its cooking not to have to waste time on décor you won’t give a second glance anyway.
Le Pré Catelan, Sofitel Rio de Janeiro Copacabana, Avenida Atlântica, 4240, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro
+55 (21) 2525 1206; leprecatelan.com.br