Meats on sticks

I have no beef with the vegetarian lifestyle. Pun intended. I think it's a healthy way to go, so long as you supplement your diet with the nutritional requirements that chicken, beef or fish provide for the typical omnivorous diet. Verdure is as appetizing to me as anything else I can imagine, and the light, energized feeling I get from eating plant-based culinary concoctions cannot be duplicated in any way by eating animal tissue.

But I'm not about to jump on the "meat-is-murder" train. Living without meat ain't for me. That's because places like these exist in this crazy world.

Rodizio churrasco: which in my gringa Portuguese means, Brazilian steakhouse. Where as long as you give the green light, meats of every cut, flavor and style are brought before you for your consumption, skewered on a massive sword and dripping with carnivorous lust. Steaks and chicken and pork and lamb that all melt like butter in your mouth, inciting that instinct within the human race that feeds the circle of life.

We went to one such slice of heaven last night in Tribeca. It was a posh, medium-sized joint, one of two in a chain on this frigid isle of Manhattan. We had spent the day walking around, showing my out-of-town cousin and his friend various points of interest. For RM and I, it had been a quest to confirm all we had read in one of Pete Hamill's masterpieces, Forever. Either way, we ended up walking what seemed like about seven miles, stopping for a whiskey or a cosmo at certain points to reinforce our tolerance of the below freezing temperatures outside. By the time we'd reached the restaurant that night (after about three miles of walking to find the place), we were empty shells of a human being, having doled out all of our vitamin and energy reserves to the hard streets of the City.

So I can happily say that I ate two tons of meat and exotic salad bar (another fabulous feature of rodizio churrasco) and didn't feel any dietary remorse. The ordeal of dragging ourselves back to the subway (conveniently across the street from the restaurant) and back to our respective beds was agony, but the protein-induced sleep was terrific.

I've had similar experiences at Brazilian steakhouses--walking miles to a place in Salt Lake City and a place in Chicago (FOGO!!!!), eating like I've haven't eaten in months, schlepping back and feeling that I am a creature meant to eat meat.