Brazilian Catering

Churrasco is a service, not a recipe. A server brings the meat to the table on the skewer, carves it onto your plate, and returns with another cut until you flip your card to red.

The carving station. A cook works the skewers at a table and slices to order, so the ceremony survives the trip. It is an occasion order, priced and planned like any staffed event, which our corporate event catering checklist covers.

Drop-off. The kitchen grills picanha, linguiça and chicken, slices it there, and sends covered pans resting in their own juices, with rice, black beans, farofa and vinagrete. You give up the theater and keep the meat, at roughly $18 to $30 per person.

Argentinian catering is a different grill tradition entirely.

Feijoada is black beans cooked long and slow with pork, about as close to a national dish as Brazil has. Restaurants there run it on Wednesdays and Saturdays, because it takes a kitchen most of a day.

For an office that is the appeal. One pot feeds a big room, and cost per head holds steadier than it does once you are counting skewers:

• White rice underneath, in volume.
• Farofa over the top: toasted cassava flour, sprinkled like a seasoning.
• Couve, collard greens shredded fine and cooked fast so they stay green.
• Orange slices on the side. Not garnish. They reset the palate between bites.

Feijoada is pork throughout, and the wrong pot for a room that avoids it.

Pão de queijo is a small hollow cheese roll made from tapioca flour, milled from cassava root, not wheat. Bread a gluten-free guest can eat is rare at a catered table.

It arrives hot, costs a fraction of anything with meat in it, and fills a table without a second entree. Whatever number you settle on, add a third.

A gluten-free recipe is not a gluten-free kitchen, though. Where celiac disease is in the room, ask about shared ovens and prep surfaces, and have that one portion sealed in the kitchen. Catering for gluten-free guests has the questions worth asking.

A vegetarian handed a churrasco spread ends up eating rice, so order the meatless half deliberately. Three dishes carry it:

• Vegetable moqueca. Coconut milk and dendê palm oil over rice, built on hearts of palm or plantain instead of fish. A main course, not a side.
• Hearts of palm salad. Palmito in rounds with tomato and onion. It does not wilt across a lunch.
• Pão de queijo. Cheese and tapioca, nothing else in it.

Then the two that look meatless and are not: Brazilian black beans usually carry bacon or sausage, and farofa is fried in the same fat. Most kitchens run a plain batch given notice.

CaterAi quotes the station version and the drop-off version before you commit. Brazilian is a change of pace rather than a weekly order, so slot it into a rotation built from the other cuisines we deliver.