If you want to get great Brazilian food in Queens, you have excellent options, but Copacabana should be near the top of your list.
Opened in 1998, it’s a standard “kilo,” food-by-the-pound restaurant, serving about 15 cuts of meat sizzling hot off the grill, with another 30 menu items from the kitchen. And it’s typically packed with a mix of Brazilian Americans and other Astoria locals.
On a recent Tuesday around 1 p.m, all 14 tables at Copacabana were taken. The diners included a woman on her laptop, a delivery guy, a man in a white button down and slacks — all chatting in Portuguese.
Several tables greeted each other: “Tudo bom?”
Copacabana is famous for its picanha, a Brazilian specialty cut of beef, and its low-key, authentic Brazilian vibe. If you feel like dining in, you can relax there in T-shirts and flip flops. It’s also a go-to spot for job seekers who’ve recently left Brazil.
The man behind much of its success is Luis Bezerra.
Antonio Bezerra at the grill station.
He's been working there, at every position from cashier to manager, since it opened in 1998. His uncle, Jose Bezerra, launched Copacabana as a Brazilian pizzeria, shortly after moving to America from Fortaleza by way of São Paulo.
The pizza spot leveraged Jose’s know-how from running a street food cart as well as Luis’ experiences working in slice shop back home. Copacabana was among the first to cater to the local Brazilian community.
It’s hard to imagine that it was once hard to find good Brazilian food in Astoria, given the many spots catering to almost every food craving of the local Brazilian-American community: Pao de Queijio, Villa Brazil, Point Brazil, Beija Flor, Rio Market.
But back in 1996, when Luis arrived in Queens, there were almost no Brazilian spots. As he tells it, all he could find from home was a small grocery store, the first iteration of Rio Market.
Only 10 years earlier, in the mid-1980s, immigration from Brazil had begun, with many settling in Manhattan’s Little Brazil, and later, Astoria. Now, the New York City area is home to the largest group of Brazilians in the country — 68,000 as of 2022.
All through the '90s, Luis said, customers streamed in, asking for traditional dishes like picanha or feijoada, and in 2000, the Bezerra family answered their requests with a total reboot into what Copacabana is now: a Brazilian “kilo” restaurant with classics from various regions of their native country.
Customers help themselves along the L-shaped arrangement of steam tables — usually starting with hot foods on the right, to the salads, and of course, the iconic churrasco (barbecue) stand. Jose was charting such new territory that he had to lug over his 40-skewer electric churrasco grill straight from Brazil.
The kilo concept tapped into a hunger, and business boomed.
“We had a very big community of Brazilian people around, but we didn’t have any restaurants,” Luis said on a recent busy Tuesday lunch service. “As soon as we opened, we had lines out the door. It was so crowded we couldn’t fit everyone.”
Along the way, Jose bought up adjacent properties on each side of his small shop to expand his kitchen and add a full dining room.
The churrasco remains the main draw: a brilliant order-what-you-want approach so that you don’t have to work through just one ginormous steak but instead can indulge in all the different flavors, cuts, doneness, and types of meat in one meal — and by grill masters specializing in Brazilian cuts. Luis said that the restaurant’s churrasco sales peaked at 4,000 pounds of meat per week in 2024.
The bestseller is the picanha, the most prized cut of meat in Brazil which, in the U.S., gets broken down into other cuts. It’s an underused muscle in the rump that produces tender and richly flavored meat. Each hunk of picanha gets sliced so that every piece has an arc of crisped up fat.
But there’s still more to Copacabana’s grill menu. It includes short ribs with a salt crust on the fat that seems just as sinful to discard as it is to consume; sirloin; tri-tip; bacon-wrapped beef and chicken; spicy sausage; garlic-marinated chicken. Another Brazilian specialty, chicken hearts, obtain a gorgeous char at the churrasco, too.
Feijoada, regarded as the national dish of Brazil, is a hearty black bean stew simmered with various cuts of smoked pork and beef. It’s typically served for laid-back lunches on weekends with friends, and at Copacabana, it’s offered on both Saturdays and Wednesdays.
The bobó de camarão, an indigenous-African-Portuguese shrimp stew in coconut milk from the northeastern coastal region of Bahia pops up on Fridays. And on Thursdays, Luis said, customers call to check that the oxtail stew — simmered from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. in two huge pots that take up the stovetop — hasn’t yet run out. It happens all the time.
Inside a refrigerated dessert station, a sweet corn pudding (curau or canjica de milho) brings forth memories of Festa Junina, a month-long festival in June in the northeastern state of Paraíba, some 4,000 miles away from Astoria.
Many kilo restaurants — outfitted with the customary buffet bar and churrasco — have cropped up since Copacabana’s opening. But Copacabana remains beloved among the local Brazilian community. It’s been particularly critical amid ramped-up demand, gentrification and ongoing construction in Astoria. Among new Brazilian immigrants, it’s often the first stop on their path to building a life in New York City.
“They come here all the time asking for help,” said Luis' brother, Antonio Bezerra, who’s been working the grill station for the last 15 years. At Copacabana, new Brazilian immigrants get the inside scoop on generous landlords, rent-controlled apartments, and job opportunities.
Late last year, Juliane Venancio came from Rondônia — where “I have the Amazon around me” — to live in New York after finishing college. In search of a job, she walked into Copacabana, and left her resume. Months later when a position opened up, Luis called her in to start work.
“I’m feeling like I’m home,” she said from the cash register. “I work here, and I have Brazilian people around me. But even outside of Copacabana, I can walk out and talk in my own language.”
The Brazilian community in Astoria is so extensive that she’s learned that she can’t use Portuguese as a secret language with friends.
“They all understand me,” she said, laughing.
