This past December, I went to Costa Rica on vacation. I’m generally a fan of Latin food, but it’s not a cuisine whose intricacies and regional variations I’m particularly well acquainted with, and I did not know all that much about (or have a lot of time to learn about) Costa Rican food prior to arriving in San José.
Unfortunately from a culinary perspective, it wasn’t the kind of vacation that allowed a lot of time for poking around random restaurants and food stands in obscure locations. And the nicer restaurants I went to were, to put it diplomatically, underwhelming. (Actually, to be blunt, I encountered what was hands-down the single worst dessert of my life in one of San José’s top restaurants; I literally could not have imagined that chocolate could be made to taste so bad, especially in a country that produces so much of it. The city may be gentrifying, but it clearly has some ways to go in terms of upscale, hipster-y cuisine.)
That said, I did manage to get hooked on casado, effectively Costa Rica’s national dish, consisting of rice, black beans, fried plantains, salad, and some kind of animal protein (I usually opted for fish). It’s simple, hearty, and—this is key— extremely difficult to screw up.
When I got back to New York, I couldn’t shake my craving for it, so I did what any reasonable person would do and googled Costa Rican restaurants in NYC, only to discover that there basically aren’t any. I was a bit taken aback—this is, after all a city, where one can find Uzbecki and Sri Lankan restaurants with relative ease—but still, I figured that there were enough Latin restaurants around that I should easily be able to find something that was effectively identical to casado, even if it was called something else.
My first inclination was to check the options in heavily Dominican Washington Heights and Inwood, but most of the reviews I read were sufficiently mixed that I didn’t bother to go look around. (I haven’t been up there in a while, so I probably will do this eventually, but in this case I was on a mission.)
My next idea was to head for Jackson Heights, where Himalayan restaurants are interspersed with Ecuadorian and Colombian ones along Roosevelt Avenue under the elevated 7 train as it heads toward Elmhurst. Surely, I figured, given the plethora of options, I would eventually find what I was looking for. But none of the restaurants I wandered into seemed to offer anything that exactly fit the bill, no matter how appealing it seemed otherwise. (I did, however, stumble upon the famous birrieria taco cart, which I will absolutely have to go back and try.) And given that I don’t exactly have a bottomless stomach, I didn’t want to end up with a huge order of food that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, finish.
Finally, it occurred to me that if I had no choice but to aim for an approximation, I needed to take a trial-and-error approach that allowed me to try smaller amounts of food—in other words, a buffet.
Now, I’m generally suspicious of open buffets in NYC for obvious sanitary reasons, but I am willing to make exceptions given the right circumstances. Shortly after I had this realization, I was walking through Astoria when I came across a Brazilian buffet restaurant; I knew Brazilian buffets were a thing, but I had never actually tried one. My interest was piqued, so I stepped inside. The food wasn’t amazing, but it did look roughly like what I was looking for, and that was enough to point me in the right direction. I assumed that restaurants in Little Brazil (E. 46th St.) in Manhattan stood a decent chance of being overpriced and mediocre, so I decided to keep my focus on Astoria.
A handful of google searches and a 10-day business trip later, I hit the jackpot in the form of Point Brazil on 31st Ave., a few blocks from the Steinway St. station. The offerings there weren’t particularly extensive, but everything was clean and fresh, and all the major components of casado were present. I was half-tempted to start exploring the various other options, but I decided to leave that for another time. I got my rice and black beans and plantains and fish, and it tasted exactly like it did in Costa Rica. The plantains in particular were exceptional: incredibly soft on the inside and perfectly caramelized on the outside. Admittedly, the fish had a slightly gummy texture, but it was tasty, and I wasn’t about to complain.
My cassado craving not quite sated, I was on the verge of going back to Point Brazil. But I was curious to try another place for comparison, and that was how I found Kilo, on Ditmars Ave. As the name suggests, it specializes in meat sold by weight, and so I couldn’t help but be a little skeptical; however, reviewers (clearly real ones, not planted bots) raved about it so consistently that it seemed worth trying.
I was glad I did. If anything, the food was even fresher and higher quality than at Point Brazil. Moreover, the restaurant had a younger, sleeker vibe, less homey and more modern. If the plantains weren’t nearly as sublime as those at Point Brazil (although still very good), the fish (tilapia?) more than compensated: moist and flavorful and absolutely melt-in-your-mouth tender, decorated with thin slices of red bell pepper. I was a little shocked at just how good it was. Reality does not often live up to reviews, but sometimes it does.
The only downer was, of all things, the rice, which was notably un-fluffy and had a texture that reminded me of the supermarket boil-in-bag stuff. Seriously, how could a restaurant make food that good and then mess up the rice? That one kind of flummoxed me.
Once the rice had absorbed liquid from the beans and released some of its starch, the texture worked much better, but it still crept a little too close to the border of acceptability. I had to wonder if next time, I shouldn’t just make my own rice (or buy it elsewhere). But that would seriously be a shame. If this place could just get the rice thing down, its “casado” would be pretty close to perfection.
