Sunday was our farewell day in NYC. So before heading out, we wanted to eat a good brunch. I picked Sushi Samba, a sushi/brazilian/peruvian restaurant near Union Square. This was also the only time where I got the streets mixed up. We ended up at Park Ave north, instead of Park Ave south. Oops. No biggie though, we hopped on the Lexington train and made it down there in a jiffy. Sushi Samba is a fairly small place. It’s very cute and bright inside. They play samba music. There’s a sushi bar in the middle, as it takes up most of the space in the whole restaurant. There’s an eating area where the sushi bar is, and through the doorway, there’s a loungey area.
It wasn’t very busy at all when we were there, so the staff was extra attentive. We went with the family style brunch. I’d checked online, and it said it was 3 selections from the first course and 3 selections from the second course plus free pika pika cocktails. That wasn’t the case in reality. It was really just 4 selections from the family brunch menu and no free cocktail. No big deal though, as it almost did seem too good to be true, especially for NYC! But we did order some fruit juices, and they were discounted a few dollars. I went with a blackberry and strawberry sucos mistas, which was beyond good. That’s just a fresh fruit juice. J got a batida with asian pear and two other fruits I forgot. A batida comes with sweetened condensed milk, in addition to the fruit. That’s something I distinctly remember about Brazil, how abundant the fruit was and how everyone drank freshly made juice all the time.
We went with the sunday samba roll, which came with , smoked salmon, cream cheese, and cucumber, plus some heapings of salad. It was good. I’m not big on smoked fish, but this wasn’t extremely strong in flavor. And I do have to say I love the coolness of the cream cheese. They’re big on cream cheese in sushi rolls in Brazil and Mexico. We also picked the doce de leite french toast. This was AWESOME. It was thick bread and came with a really sweet and incredible syrup. It had something chopped up in it, and we’re not sure what it was, but we both loved it. It also came with some asian pear and fresh fruit.
Next up was the was the eggs benedict, which came with huge pieces of smoked salmon. The eggs were poached in a strange way so that it was mostly yolk, and that the yolk was not cooked at all so it was very runny. I didn’t mind it, but I know some people do not like runny eggs. Instead of english muffin, it came on some toasted bread. It was also topped with some baby cilantro greens, which was such a light and refreshing cilantro flavor. Finally, we had the churrasco and eggs. This was also delicious. It is fairly plain, as Brazilians don’t season their meat very much when grilling, but it was cooked very well and had plenty of natural flavor. Even though it’s not a fancy cut of meat at all, it wasn’t tough or anything. I liked the freshly fried onion rings too! All in all, a very good brunch!
" list. So of course, I decided to try them all. Join me for this 15-post series, as I test out each of these cocktails to see just how worthy they are.
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