Brasa - Minneapolis

Rating:

Buying takeout at Brasa can be problematic.

Picture this: I was driving home from the restaurant. There was a large brown paper bag on the passenger seat, and the aroma quickly enveloping my car was as mentally distracting as a behind-the-wheel cell phone chat. Figuring that I was a few inhales away from a fender bender, I pulled over, rifled through the glove compartment for one of the disposable forks I keep on hand, grabbed the first container within reach and started eating. Given my driving record, I hope none of this was caught on camera by law enforcement officials.

Not that it wouldn't have been worth a ticket. At Brasa, chef/owner Alex Roberts, who more than proves his culinary mettle every night at his nearby Restaurant Alma, is taking aim at home-cooking traditions from a wide-yet-interconnected cultural swath that starts in West Africa and moves through the Caribbean, the American South and Central and South America. "It's the food I like to make at home," he told me earlier this summer, and now I'm thinking it might be the food that I want to make in my own kitchen, too. It isn't elegant or cutting-edge and it doesn't have the looks to make the cover of Bon Appetit any time soon. But it sure is satisfying.

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