Over Acme: Skip the Lame Acme Bar and Grill, and Go Brazilian

There's something, to borrow a word from pop psychology, empowering about walking out of a bad circumstance, be it a movie, restaurant or blind date. And while I'm not generally the sort of person to just up and leave a crummy restaurant or movie, the other day I did just that.

It happened a few Sundays ago. A friend and I had arranged earlier in the week to meet for brunch at Acme Bar and Grill, the Tex-Mex sort of dive on Great Jones St. that has a $9.95 brunch menu with offerings like chicken-fried steak and Jimmy Dean sausages with eggs and hotcakes and cheese grits, to hash over the events of our respective Saturday nights. For a long time, I considered their brunch a good deal, since it not only included a bloody mary or other drink, but also left one full and happy and wanting to do nothing more with the rest of the day than sit around and watch golf or football on tv. But while the food was acceptable (even though Cowgirl Hall of Fame, over in the West Village, does a better job with their chicken-fried steak) and certainly cheap enough to silence most complaints, the service has always been unbelievably poor. And it's getting worse.

So there we were, at 12:10 on a Sunday afternoon. We had arrived 10 minutes earlier, and in the elapsed time since sitting down a busboy had tossed a couple of menus on the table and brought us some water. But neither of the two waitresses on duty?both indie chicks with loud tops and the waistbands of their Joe Boxer underwear hanging out above their jeans, and who, six hours earlier, were most likely having sex with their musician boyfriends or each other in some soon-to-be-condemned loft in DUMBO and smoking the rest of last week's tips?had come by to take so much as a drink order. Instead, they just breezed back and forth to the kitchen, staring right past our hopeful glances like a couple of cheerleaders doing their best to ignore the band geeks. This pair of overwhelmed young women had a total of two other tables to deal with in the entire place. Between them.

This was not the first time I've had bad service at Acme, but it was certainly the worst. One evening during the summer, I came for dinner with a group of coworkers, and it took so long to get the check that our company's president considered staging a mass walkout with all of us, and letting them chase us down for the money. Another time, during another brunch, one of my companions ordered a second bloody mary. They never brought it, and when asked where it was, the waitress pointed at another drink on the table, saying, "It's right there." Apparently the idea that two people might be having bloodies with their brunch was too much to handle.

"You know," my friend said, "there's supposed to be a great Brazilian place for brunch a few blocks from here."

"Okay," I replied. "If no one comes by in five minutes, we're outta here."

Needless to say, five minutes later, our presence at Acme was still unrecognized. So we got up, tossed on our coats, and strolled out of the place. A few minutes later we were at Riodizio on Lafayette St. In terms of both service and food, it was like stepping into another world.

Riodizio's specialty is beef, and lots of it. The restaurant specializes in churrascaria, the Brazilian phenomenon, by now well-known in New York, that involves an endless procession of waiters bringing spits of various kinds of meat to your table and sawing off hunks of it, stuffing customers to the point where they are practically shaking from all the protein. Though I'm a huge red-meat eater, it had been ages since I had sat down for one of these feasts; the last time was in Rio de Janeiro in 1996, where I gorged for two hours on the stuff before heading to the airport for the long hump over the equator to JFK. At least I was able to sleep on the flight.

Walking into the restaurant's sleek, modern, dim decor, customers are immediately greeted and seated by the hostess. In another minute, a waitress comes by?efficiently, and unlike at Acme, without a hint of I'd-rather-be-doing-performance-art attitude. The staff is clearly Brazilian; you can tell both from their looks (gorgeous) and from the way they pronounce Portuguese (flawless). While the restaurant has menus that offer a variety of Brazilian takes on brunch dishes, the only reason anyone in the place?and the crowd at the tables is quite diverse, from duets and trios of late-twentysomething couples to a pair of proper-looking, older, ladies-who-lunch types?has come is for the all-you-can-eat brunch.

Our waitress offers us drinks?we order caipirinhas, the delicious and sneaky Brazilian national cocktail of cachaca, or sugarcane rum, sugar and lime?explains how things work and starts sending stuff out for us. On the table is a little cylinder that's red on one end and green on the other. When the green side is up, the feast continues; when the red is shown, the strolling butchers bypass your table and let you digest. In the background, meanwhile, an almost jarring mix of tunes plays; when we arrived, some Irish lads were singing about going to work in Liverpool, and by the time we started eating, Moby was booming through the speakers. A minor distraction. After some preliminaries (salad, bread), the meat started flowing.

Within five minutes of taking our seats, a man comes out with two spits holding what they called hanger steak?though, as my Brazilian friend Candida reminds me, since every country cuts a cow up differently, it's not all going to look exactly the same. Really, it's small chunks of meat that have been marinated to give them an almost fruity essence; a few pieces are dropped on our plates, and they are tender, juicy and good. In a little while, chicken breasts and thighs come out?the thighs, with their darker meat, are the clear winner?and this is followed by other goodies. A huge, Flintstones-like hunk of sirloin comes around, and we use the tongs they have given us to peel back the slices as the carver works his knife. A large peeled pineapple comes out, and we have a few strips of that. In between all this, we get a cauldron of Brazilian-style scrambled eggs, a plate of fried plantains and other stuff, and the protein is starting to hit us. I was reminded of the custom of the young men of the Masai tribes in Kenya, who, before they go out into the bush to kill a lion?an act that is, along with ritual circumcision at puberty, a critical stage in attaining manhood?kill one of their prized cattle and eat every last bit of the thing over the course of several days. The fellas, unaccustomed to so much protein (they rarely, if ever, kill their cattle, since that is where all the family wealth resides) are practically vibrating by the end of the feast, and so were we.

After a while, we had to surrender. Clearly, neither one of us had psyched ourselves up properly for such a feast; had we prepared (and not eaten at all the day before) and engaged in a little strategy (using the stop-and-go cylinder to take digestion breaks), we could have kept our meal up for another hour. By then, though, we may have wound up going to the Bronx Zoo and trying to take a whack at a lion of our own. As it stood, my cat eyed me nervously for the rest of the day at home.

Acme Bar and Grill, 9 Great Jones St. (betw. B'way & Lafayette St.), 420-1934.

Riodizio, 417 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & 4th St.), 529-1313.