Winter has returned to Rochester at long last. Our two-month reprieve from snow and ice came to an abrupt end last week, and within a day I started thinking about escaping to somewhere warm and sandy. At such times, I'll often gravitate toward Latin-American food, particularly the food of the islands - I'll seek out Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican food (the latter two cuisines are well-represented in our city).

And then one wet afternoon, with the sky spitting snow, I stumbled on the cheery green, yellow, and blue sign outside Samba Cafe on State Street, right across the street from Kodak's headquarters. It was lunchtime - open only until 5 p.m. weekdays, Samba Cafe is not really a dinner kind of place - and most of the folding chairs in the sparse dining room were full of happy people working their way through massive plates of food that looked very much like the sort of thing you'd see at most Puerto Rican joints in town, with one crucial difference. Where the food at most Puerto Rican and Dominican take-outs glistens with juicy fat and abundant gravy, the plates I saw here were lighter looking. The meat was grilled rather than stewed, the greens sauteed rather than boiled, the rice white and fluffy rather than annatto-tinged and dense. Intrigued, I wandered up the counter, and grabbed a menu.

If you've ever heard of Brazilian food, it's likely been in the context of a churrascaria, a Brazilian steakhouse where waiters wander around with long skewers of grilled meat, slicing off bits of this and chunks of that for diners. There are no skewers, no open grill, and no waiters at Samba Cafe. What owner Paulo Botelho offers is the food that the waiters in those high-end restaurants are probably eating in the kitchen at the end of their shifts - black beans, rice, greens or salad, and simply grilled meat served with chopped tomato and onion, with a bottle of hot sauce close at hand to liven things up a bit. This, Botelho explains, is the food he grew up with in the state of Minas Gerais in southern Brazil. It is cooking he learned from his grandmother on the family farm as a child.

In the same way that Americans have Southern food, Brazilians have cozinha mineira, simple comfort food distinct from the flashier fare served at churrascaria and high-end restaurants. This style is long on rice and black beans, the former enriched with little more than butter and salt, the latter dolled up with fresh garlic, black pepper, and onions - no cumin, hot pepper, or pork fat, as is almost universally found elsewhere. It isn't poverty food, but it's not the food of the idle rich, either. It is food meant to keep a body moving through afternoons of hard work on a farm. And that's exactly where Botelho hopes to end up. As he tells it, keeping the business going so far hasn't given him the opportunity to develop a close relationship with a local farmer (he does a fair amount of his shopping at the Public Market), but he eventually wants to own a farm of his own, setting up a self-sustaining system in which the profits from the restaurant support his own farm, which in turn produces the food that he serves at the restaurant.

Anyone who has ever squinted at the fine print that reads "pre-cooked weight" under the name of their favorite "quarter-pound" burger can tell you that grilling can drastically reduce the mass of a piece of meat. In many cultures where meat is grilled, the pieces are small and served on skewers as a sort of condiment to vegetables and starch. All of the meat at Samba Cafe is grilled and then sliced into bite-sized pieces. Botelho has a masterful touch at the grill, putting beautiful marks on beef, chicken, and pork, and cooking them just right - the steak a gorgeous medium-rare, the pork and chicken done but still tender and juicy within.

The pork is particularly worthy of praise. Since pork is lean and tender, and therefore easily overcooked, Botelho marinates the meat before tossing it on the grill and then dresses it with a nice quantity of lime while it is resting. (Adding it to a marinade would toughen the meat, and hasten drying over open flame.)

Samba offers a fairly extensive menu, but it's this grilled meat that deserves your attention. Served either on a plate with rice, beans, and either salad (Brazilian plate, $8.50), or sauteed collard greens (Miniero plate, $8.50), or in a tortilla (Brazilian wrap, $7.50), lunch at Samba won't set you back more than $10, and even then you are likely to have leftovers. The wraps, particularly, are gigantic. My companion, who was overwhelmed by the size of the dish put in front of her, proclaimed that her lunch was "stomach sized" - a fair description of an entree that hung over both sides of the plate.

Big is something of a theme at Samba. Half of a chicken panini with bacon and cheese ($7), beautifully grilled on what tasted like a real Cuban roll - dense and sweet with a good crust on the outside - was easily six inches wide and seven inches long. A thick and gooey quesadilla ($5-$7) was so large that at first we thought that Botelho had made a mistake and given us two orders rather than one. Even the salads are big, easily split between two people and full of all sorts of good things including house-pickled beets, crunchy greens, hearts of palm, and shredded mozzarella cheese (a nod to Botelho's native queijo minas, a cheese similar in texture to both Mexican queso fresco and Italian ricotta salata), along with Botelho's own balsamic-lime dressing to zip things up. If this is how farmers normally eat in Brazil, I think I know where I'll be taking my vacation this winter.

To find Samba Cafe in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Samba Cafe

350 State St.

287-5700, sambacafeauthenticbrazilian.com

Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m.