Why Beef-Loving Brazil Is So Obsessed With an American Steakhouse Chain
24th June 2023
Deep in the urban sprawl of the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, nestled within a thicket of highways, there is a low-slung shopping mall that boasts an attraction not rivaled anywhere in the United States.
The giant Outback Steakhouse.
Named the world’s largest Outback in 2018 — and the world’s most lucrative before that — its dimensions and legend since then have only grown. The restaurant is now nearly twice the size of the biggest Outbacks in the United States, where the faux-Australian chain was founded.
But even then, it’s not big enough. Not for Brazil, and not on a recent Monday.
Hostess Kalany Nunes, 19, surveys the line for lunch, several dozens deep.
“This is Outback,” she explains. “It’s very chic.”
Americans can do fake foreign better than anybody else in the world. USA! USA!
(I hace to admit that their waitresses are much better looking than American ones.)