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A feast to remember

Sitting down at a rodizio-style restaurant can be daunting, but that ultimately gives way to childlike wonder and excitement once you see the big cuts of meat impaled on skewers that are paraded out of the kitchen and straight to the table.

From filet mignon and New York strip to parmesan-crusted pork loin and lamb chops, the diversity in options is staggering. Going in with the intention of tasting everything will leave you crawling out the front door later. But don’t let it stop you from trying.

Guests are given a two-sided card — one side green, the other red. Flipping the card to the green face tells the chefs — or gauchos — that you’re ready to go. Any time a cut of meat is ready to serve, it’s taken directly off a 600- to 900-degree rotisserie grill in the kitchen and directly to the dining room. Gauchos cut off pieces of the meat from table to table until it’s gone.

“Some places you go and you order steak, but this is different,” said Edson Ludwig, area manager of Galpao Gaucho, a Brazilian steakhouse downtown. “It’s all about the experience. The chefs bring the experience directly to the table and ask you, ‘How do you like it?’ To cut the desired temperature right there and experience the variety — it’s unlike anything anywhere else.”

The meat lacks the smoky flavor popular in U.S. barbecue, as gaucho-chefs seek to preserve the natural flavor of the farm-raised beef. Smoking the meat can alter the taste, but the rotisserie slowly cooks the meat until the outer layer is nicely seared and the inside is tender and juicy.

Traditionally, gauchos were cowboys or ranchers, and a sort of folk symbol in regions of South America, including Argentina and Brazil. The gaucho-chefs of Brazilian steakhouses today have adopted the name to represent that history and culture.

While the concept is somewhat familiar in the Lowcountry — with local steakhouses Galpao Gaucho opening in 2020 and Cowboy Brazilian Steakhouse opening in North Charleston in 2016 — the style of dining has deep roots in Brazil.

“This is very traditional in Brazil, especially if you go to the South,” said Cowboy Brazilian co-owner Ana Maria Dias. “But really, it’s everywhere. Almost any restaurant you go to is just like this.”

Dias is from northern Brazil, where she previously worked in the hospitality industry operating a hotel service. She moved to the U.S. with her husband and started working in the kitchen at Cowboy Brazilian before buying it from the previous owners during the pandemic, she said.

Ludwig is from southern Brazil and was raised as a gaucho taking care of cattle on the family farm. He moved to San Paulo and spent many years in the restaurant business before moving to the U.S. in 2002 and starting to work in Brazilian steakhouses, which reminded him of home, he said.

“The culture of the steakhouses here is the same we have in Brazil,” he said. “The experience itself is the same as you’d get in Brazil, too. We’ve preserved the authenticity with the service style.”

A 2016 article from Eater says it’s almost impossible to determine who really invented the rodizio, which means rotation, style of dining, as several Brazilian restaurants claim the “first” title. But the concept was popularized in the mid-1900s, the article says, coinciding with Brazil’s big road-construction boom. Restaurants opened around the country to feed truck drivers, and grilled meat was the easiest and cheapest food to serve, as the region boasted huge numbers of cattle herds.

Ludwig said he has worked to ensure that Galpao Gaucho is as true to that history as possible.

“It’s so important to focus on preserving these southern Brazilian traditions with the gaucho-chefs. It’s a very important part of our culture,” he said. “The leave-in style — the cowboy that grows up on the farm, taking care of the cattle, that’s our roots.”

The service style isn’t the only thing that has made its way from Brazil.

“The meat is totally accurate in the way it’s done, especially the sauce and chimichurri,” Dias said. “The one we call the ‘house special’ is the one I like the most. In Brazil, we call it picanha.”

Picanha is a Brazilian steakhouse staple. The most traditional cut, taken from the top of a cow’s rump and seasoned heavily with salt, is skewered into a C shape before going on the rotisserie grill. It’s similar to a sirloin in flavor and texture, but a juicy fat cap infuses the steak with flavor and tenderness that you can’t find anywhere else.

“That fat cap on the outside is what makes the picanha special,” Ludwig said. “As the meat turns on the skewer, the fat melts and runs over the meat. That’s where the flavor is.”

Galpao Gaucho also offers a “spicy” picanha that packs a bit of a kick, but not too much so that anyone can still enjoy it.

“The seasonings are also very traditional Brazilian, and most cuts just have sea salt,” Ludwig said. “We keep the natural flavors of the meat, but with 17 different options, they all have different seasonings — the lamb, the chicken, the pork and the seafood.

“The lamb is marinated in white wine and fresh mint blended with spices like garlic and pepper. The chicken is heavily seasoned with a blend of different spices, and the pork has a white wine marinade with a different spice blend.”

But what really enhances the flavor of the meat is the sauces. As is traditional, both restaurants make their chimichurri and other sauces from scratch — a perfect pairing for the steak, especially the picanha.

While Brazilian steakhouses may not be the best spot for vegetarians, the salad bars and hot bars offer options meant to pad guests between rounds of meat.

Mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy, Brazilian-style black beans, fresh salad greens, potato salad, smoked salmon and more are featured on an all-you-can-eat, self-serve salad bar. And it’s here that you’ll find some more familiar selections, too, Dias said.

“The salad bar is adapted a little to American tastes,” she said. “But you’ll find some traditional options there, too.”

Some non-meat options are also served rodizio style, including the famed pineapple. Grilled on the rotisserie to glistening perfection, then rolled in cinnamon for a sweet, spicy bite, the pineapple is a Brazilian staple that serves as both dessert and a way to get you back in the game.

“Even when you’re full, you always have room for the pineapple,” Dias said, laughing. “So many people come back just for that.”

Bread and cheese options are also abundant, with fresh baked rolls and puffed breads that pair perfectly with the chimichurri or butter. Galpao Gaucho’s cheese bread is baked with yucca flour, making it gluten free to boot.

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Wes Denney, owner of Brown Dog Deli, is a TikTok star, but he has a confession to make: He’s not really all that into TikTok.

Fortunately for him, his daughter Hailey is, and when she coaxed him into goofing around on camera, he figured it would be a good daddy-daughter bonding time. Little did he know that one of the videos would leap to 5 million views and his business would expand as a result.

“The idea was something for us to do and something for the staff to do,” Denney said. “After hours, we would get together, we’d get a small group and do TikToks. I had heard of it, but I couldn’t spell it. I didn’t have the app, and I refused to watch them. My daughter was in charge, and it was very small scale. I think it was like, ‘Let’s get revenge on dad and make him look stupid on TikTok!’”

The idea, which started about two years ago, grew with the audience, and Hailey engaged the dancing talents of one of the employees, who happened to be head of the Charleston Cougarettes at the College of Charleston, Madi Lynch.

The first videos were only modestly popular. “One day, we made a video where my daughter and the others would run from the house and run into Brown Dog and run to the counter and pretend to order, then run to the seat and drink a little chai latte. My daughter and I went out to eat that night, and it was like, ‘Release the Kracken!’ Lo and behold, we’re moving from 600 likes or hits or whatever you call them, to 6,000, and then to 38,000. My daughter is freaking out because this is her dream, and I’m excited because she’s excited. It was neat watching it,” he said.

At that point, he said, he thought maybe it was time to put a little more effort into the videos, and they became more choreographed. The dancers would lip-sync to corny vintage songs, with Denney always hamming it up in the background. He now has a closet of props for the videos and a waiting list of people wanting to be in the videos with him. Even more important, he has a waiting list of about 20 to 30 people who want to work at the deli, a rarity in these short-staffed times.

Denney said the first day after the video reached 5 million views, “I would say that literally, the next day, we had our first lines out the door, and we haven’t skipped a beat since. We’ve gotten busier over time. I’ve had to extend my kitchen, double my staff and change my menu to take off some of the more time-consuming things because it became too hard to get ready.”

That kind of growth is rare, and TikTok took notice of that lightning-in-a-bottle moment to create a small business page that featured Brown Dog Deli.

“I had to do a terrible rap song for the web page — I mean, it was supposed to be terrible — and, at some point, they awarded me with five billboards, three in Charleston. It took six hours to get one good picture of me for that!”

Hailey is a junior at the University of Georgia, and Denney hopes to hand the business over to her some day. For that reason, he won’t do anything too over-the-top, even if it would garner more TikTok viewers.

“I didn’t want too much profanity or racy stuff,” he said. “I wanted the videos to be safe, fun and family-oriented because my face and my business are attached to them.”

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James Island-based artist Cristina Victor showcases Charleston’s ceramic art community in her curatorial debut, SHAPERS. The group exhibition at the James Island Cultural Arts Center includes sculptural ceramic works by 19 Charleston-based artists and is on view now through Jan. 11, 2024.

The maximalist, salon-style exhibition serves as an opportunity to recognize an “incredibly dynamic and skilled community that is overdue and deserving of visibility,” Victor said.Born and raised in Miami, Victor received her master’s degree in fine art in San Francisco and is now an interdisciplinary artist and studio art professor at the College of Charleston. She moved here in March 2020 and said “ceramics is what got me through” the pandemic and being alone in a new place.

“It was like this thing I could completely pour myself into and endlessly learn,” she said. “It was endless. It was boundless.” (These are themes explored in Victor’s own colorful sculpture included in the show, titled “Quimbara.”)

To get involved in the local artistic community of her new home, Victor started working at Studio Union, an artist-run studio space in North Charleston. That’s where she connected with artists like Susan Klein, a fellow interdisciplinary artist who also teaches at College of Charleston, and Susan Gregory, who directs Studio Union and is an artist working in ceramics and encaustic.

Victor said the exhibition also relied on her meeting Myra Bowie, who owns Riverland Terrace pottery studio Terrace Clay and introduced Victor to many of the represented artists. Like Studio Union, Terrace Clay is an artist-run studio space founded after the longtime Charleston pottery hub cone10 closed in 2019 — after nearly 20 years serving the artistic community — when its space was bought and demolished due to development on the downtown peninsula.After working in Charleston, Victor decided to curate a group show.

“I knew I had to kind of pay my dues and hang out and see what was going on. But in general, I immediately felt like, there’s a lack of representation of a lot of kinds of artists here.”

Through conversations with fellow artists, Victor began to sense many Charleston artists felt similarly and though art spaces in Charleston represent a very specific kind of work. For artists who are creating experimental, subversive art, the options to show are limited.

“I became aware of this sense that there isn’t a whole lot of representation outside of the kind of art that I feel really appeals to tourism,” she said. “We don’t see enough art about the complexities of the history of this place.”

With these issues of visibility in mind, it was important for Victor that the group exhibition went in an accessible and free community space — that’s why she put SHAPERS in the admission-free James Island Cultural Arts Center.

“I’m kind of punk about things — sitting around waiting for something to happen is not my jam. And so I was like, I’m not seeing this, I’m going to make it.”

A sculptural altar piece by Steph Frederickson invites introspection and meditation, while an artwork of a dilapidated house complete with a spider web inside by Holly T. Benton speaks to themes of ephemeral beauty. A wall of shelves holds many smaller pieces by the group of artists and is presented without labels, as if the works all together represent one large artwork by a collective, rather than individual artists.

The show speaks thematically to community, to Charleston, its beauty and horror, and the compulsive, generative practice that is making artwork — specifically the experience of making three dimensional works which exist in a state of simultaneous physical fragility and powerful presence.

“There’s just a lot of richness here,” Victor said. “And I’m not trying to represent the whole ceramic world of Charleston with this show — I know a lot of people are left out that I probably haven’t met yet or seen yet. I know that there’s a lack of connection with certain communities here. If I do this show again, I want to prioritize finding those kinds of makers.”

Victor received awesome feedback from artists and community members, saying many people agree that a Charleston ceramic salon-style exhibition should occur regularly. She said she hopes SHAPERS “ignites more people to find ways to show their work in ways other than what we’ve had available to us.

“I think we’ve got to demand a little bit more of the city. There’s so much more going on than what’s being shown — we’re busting at the seams. It’s a matter of how we collectively figure that out.”

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It was a match that didn’t decide anything, per se, but it was far from meaningless.

And the level of play spoke to that fact.

In the end, Woodrow Wilson repeated at the Class AAA Region 3 champion with a four-set 24-26, 25-16, 25-16, 25-18 victory against George Washington Saturday afternoon at Woodrow’s gymnasium.

Both teams played their way into next week’s state tournament at the Charleston Coliseum.

George Washington beat Greenbrier East 25-16, 25-7, 29-27 earlier Saturday morning and Woodrow Wilson beat South Charleston 25-14, 25-14, 25-16.

Seeds were already determined before Saturday’s regional tournaments for the state tournament which starts Wednesday.

But both teams brought their A games.

The match really turned midway through the second set.

GW scored the first six points of the match and looked to be building on the momentum of a first set they won by scoring the final two points of the set that neither team led by more than three points.

Woodrow fought right back, scoring five straight, and it was eventually tied at 7-7, 8-8, 10-10 and 11-11.

And then it turned.

Woodrow ended up placing shots exactly where it wanted them, coming up with big kills from its front line — namely senior Saira Diehl, Anya Hasan, Salia Harris and Alexis Coleman and Alana Penn, as well as the backline of Emily Gallaher, Abby Mower and Abby Dillon. And Woodrow scored 14 of the final 19 points to take the set and even the match 1-1.

“Just a change in momentum (and) it didn’t come until the middle of that second set,” Woodrow Wilson coach Bre Rhodes said. “We became more of a team, talked like a team and took care of the ball. It’s a win and winning against a team like George Washington is always big, especially heading down to the state tournament.”

The momentum continued to build, although the third set was tight, Woodrow leading 15-14 before running off seven straight points to take charge and eventually win 25-16 again.

The third set stood at 11-10 before Woodrow Wilson again surged with 10 of the next 12 to basically put the match out of reach. Woodrow won it 25-18.

“We’ve just been on a roll the last couple of weeks,” Rhodes said. “They are coming together as a team, communicating and everything is coming together like we need it to come together right now.”

She praised the effort of her three seniors, Diehl, Gallaher and Mower.

“Emily and Abby are just constant,” Rhodes said. “And Saira with the blocks and the hits out there. They make a big difference.”

Now Woodrow heads back to the state tournament for the third year in a row.

“It means everything,” Gallaher said of making it to the state tournament for the third year. “It’s my senior year and the last couple of years we went, and we lost in the first round. This year I really think we can take it there.”

The loss by Greenbrier East was a sad affair for coach Matt Sauvage, who coached his daughter Dia for the final time.

“It was better than I ever thought it could be,” he said of coaching his daughter. “You always wonder how it’s going to be coaching your kids. It’s a different relationship but I can honestly say she has been a great kid to coach. Not just talent wise. She is a great talent. But it’s built our relationship even stronger and that’s all you can ask for as a dad.”

Sauvage also praised his other three seniors.

“We ended up 43-13, which is a great record, but that’s not what I’m going to take away from this team.” Sauvage said. “They are all great young ladies. They are awesome. That’s my takeaway from this team. Peyton Barker is one of those people that if you don’t like her, something is wrong with you. Taylor Boswell came out after two years off and it was amazing to have her back out with us. Gracie Gumm is another one who if you don’t, like her something is wrong with you. All four of these young ladies were big contributors to our success and all four of those girls are going to go so far in whatever they do. I can’t speak enough good things about these girls.”

The only drawback Saturday was the start, losing 25-16, 25-7.

“The first two sets we were struggling a little bit there, I don’t know if we were nervous, but we came out slow,” Sauvage said. “The third set (29-27 GW) it was nice to see them turn it around. They gave it all they had, and it was a fun set for sure.”

Charleston, SC - Beatriz Alves had a double-double with 35 assists and 12 digs, but it was not enough as the Hofstra volleyball team fell in three sets to Charleston on Saturday afternoon at TD Arena.

Yagmur Cinel tied her career-high with 19 kills in the match, while Chiara Cucco picked up a match-high 18 digs.

Hofstra falls to 18-8 overall and 8-7 in league play. Charleston improved to 11-15 and an identical 8-7 CAA mark. Set scores were 20-25, 25-27, and 19-25.

Clara Ball added 10 kills and five digs for the Pride, which also got six kills and five digs from Beatriz Braga.

Sopheea Mink had 15 kills for Charleston, while Lexi Wierzbicki tallied 12 kills and 10 digs.

These same two teams will battle on Sunday at 12 p.m. for a huge late season match-up with major CAA Championship implications.

NOTES - The series between Hofstra and Charleston is now tied 12-12. The Pride had won the previous three meetings in the series before today. - Cinel previously had 19 kills at North Carolina A&T on October 7, 2023. - The double-double was the seventh of the season for Alves.