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Food guide

How to find good Brazilian food

Most Americans meet Brazilian food as a churrascaria — endless skewers of grilled meat carried to the table until you flip a card to red. That format is real and it is also about a tenth of what Brazilian cooking is.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Picanha carved at the table — The top sirloin cap, fat layer intact, salted and grilled. It is the cut Brazilians care about and the one to judge a churrascaria on.
  • Rock salt and nothing else — Traditional churrasco is seasoned with coarse salt, full stop. Heavy marinades are covering something.
  • A serious salad bar — At a good rodizio the cold bar is not filler — hearts of palm, farofa, vinagrete, cheese bread, feijoada on the side.
  • Feijoada on Saturdays — The black bean and pork stew is traditionally a weekend dish. A restaurant that runs it Saturdays is following the tradition rather than the tourist schedule.
  • Pão de queijo made there — Tapioca-flour cheese bread, served hot and hollow. From a freezer bag it is dense and sad.

What to order

  • Picanha — At a churrascaria, wave the rest through until this arrives.
  • Feijoada completa — Black beans with pork, over rice, with farofa, collards and orange.
  • Moqueca — Bahian coconut and palm-oil fish stew. The best thing in Brazilian cooking that Americans rarely see.
  • Coxinha — Teardrop-shaped fried chicken croquette. Street food, and a good bakery test.
  • Caipirinha — Cachaça, lime, sugar. The national drink and hard to get wrong.

Where to find Brazilian food

Open listings put 1,039 Brazilian restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 33 Orlando, FL 29 Newark, NJ 26 Los Angeles, CA 25 Miami, FL 14 Philadelphia, PA 13 Las Vegas, NV 13 Deerfield Beach, FL 12 San Francisco, CA 11 Everett, MA 11 Austin, TX 11 Pompano Beach, FL 10

Campuses with the most within a mile

Touro University 16 CUNY Graduate Center 12 FIT 10 John Jay 9 The New School 7 NYU 5 LaGuardia 5 BMCC 5 Baruch 5 Jefferson 4

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Brazilian searches distinguish churrascaria from Brazilian home cooking, which are two different meals at two different prices. Mentions of picanha, feijoada and moqueca in menus and reviews point at the second; rodizio and salad-bar language at the first. The matcher uses whichever your search implies.

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Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat with a big group Where to eat when you're celebrating something What to eat after a workout