If you are looking for a nice Brazilian restaurant with enough flavor to fly you off in a fat private jet to some crazy Mardi Gras street party in Rio, Bossa Nova on Sunset won’t quite get you there. But the layover can be impressive enough.
As my friends and I drove along Sunset Boulevard, we expected a typical night of Brazilian cuisine, but we also knew the restaurant was billing itself as a fusion joint. Pulling from European, Middle Eastern, African and American influences, Brazilian food has a rare enough mix of fruit flavors, strong spices and heavy frying to start off a night with friends. Add to that an existing cultural mix of pizzas and pastas, and you are definitely in for a global dining experience.
Unfortunately, the rest of the typical Hollywood crowd seemed to feel the same, as my party of nine found itself standing outside with more groups of trendily clad 20-somethings looking to check out the club scene along the boulevard. Don’t bring more than a few friends on a busy weekend because you’ll likely find yourselves splitting up like we did to get out of the cold and into the restaurant.
I ordered a passion-fruit punch and two of the girls I came with picked up the sangria. I forget how strong of a bite passion fruit can have, but it ended up being a great compliment to whatever dish I tried. The sangria was also pretty decent, but it could’ve been improved by being a lot messier. The restaurant’s mix of wine with apple chunks didn’t compete with the crazier mixes of apples, pineapple and grapes ““ and whatever other fruit my friends had lying around ““ from our own experiments.
We chose Brazilian-centered appetizers to start things off. The coxinha, or shredded chicken and egg shaped into a deep-fried pear, was an awesome textural dish because the meat was so finely cut that it disintegrated in my mouth, but was balanced by the crispy bread coating. When I bit into the pao de queijo, or dinner bread infused with cheese, I couldn’t figure out when the cheese ended and the bread began.
One trend I noticed is that Bossa Nova can pull off the Brazilian part of their menu, but the non-Brazilian aspect was lacking. This was especially true of our main dishes, when one friend, his girlfriend and I all decided to sample the pasta while our fourth dinner companion chose a more authentic dish.
I choose the gnocchi with marinara sauce to keep things simple, but of all our dishes, I found it to be the least interesting. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t executed adequately ““ it had the gooey texture you expect from gnocchi ““ but the sauce was kind of generic. The more elegant pasta carbonara fared better, and the smokiness from the pepper felt right when coupled with the saltiness of the bacon.
Only one of our party had the guts to try a Brazilian main course with Willy’s Favorite Burrito, and it left the rest of us regretting our decisions. The cooks were tasteful with her fried plantains, shying away from the street-vendor approach of frying everything until deeply burnt or piling on the brown sugar to exaggerate the sweetness. Her burrito brought everything home to that party in Rio for me: The combination of black beans, rice, red onions, grilled white Mexican shrimp and spices had a rowdy conversation in my mouth that still managed to avoid being broken up by the cops.
After our food-coma chat, we walked across the restaurant to meet with our friends, who complained about a waiter who wouldn’t refill their drinks until dessert and how one had to deal with the burnt taste of her coffee from the bottom of the pot. So while our dinner was enjoyable enough, there were just a few too many kinks to the night that would keep me from coming back regularly.