Most weeks, as you know, I leave the little recommending slots at the bottom of my review to a brief digest of a couple of your e-mails. It helps to give a nationwide picture when I am unable to get out of London, keeps you lot writing in when I cannot join you for meals, and creates an air, I think, of democracy on this otherwise rather autocratic page. Some people think I do it because I am lazy and can't be bothered to write them myself. And it is they who may take offence at this week's review.

For this week, after a brief introduction from me, most of the main review will be a reprinted e-mail. And if you think I did it to save time and energy, then believe me, I spent more time worrying about whether it was the right thing to do than I would ever have done writing it myself.

This week's meal was eaten at Mocoto, a big, flashy, expensive, new Brazilian restaurant in Knightsbridge out of which I would normally take the mickey (as most of the other critics have done) for being big, flashy, expensive, new, Brazilian and in Knightsbridge. But that would be, I think, a rather soul-destroying exercise.

In Knightsbridge, they like their restaurants big and flashy and expensive. It's why they go to Zuma and Amaya and the Fifth Floor at Harvey Nicks and used to go to this place when it was called Isola and was a travesty on the Italian theme much as it now is upon the Brazilian. And so who am I to skulk down there on the Northern Line (with just a touch of Piccadilly) and tell them they're wrong?

And as for its similarity to restaurants in Brazil, how am I, who has never set foot on the Latin American continent, to judge? The normal thing would be to Google up some dodgy facts (such as “Brazilian Portuguese has 217 words for ‘egg'” and “until a change of government in 1994, it was traditional in the southern part of the country to eat fricasseed orphan on Thursdays”), name-check Ronaldinho, Machado de Assis and extreme groinal waxing, and then run like billy-o for the last full stop. But I thought I'd try and do better.

So I took with me not just my girlfriend, Rachel, but also her elder brother, Joseph, who speaks fluent Portuguese and has spent a lot of time in Brazil, and also his flatmate, Rina, who speaks even fluenter Portuguese and has spent considerably more time in Brazil, what with being Brazilian. I even took Rachel's younger brother, Luke, who has also spent time in Brazil, but not quite as much, and only because he likes dressing up.

So anyway, we had a few drinks in the vast, corporate-plush upstairs bar and then ate in the even vaster, corporate-plusher basement restaurant, and I thought the food was rather good, if expensive, given the horrors one might have expected. And Joseph agreed but said you couldn't really make comparisons with the mother country, because “posh Brazilian food” does not exist in Brazil, where the point of going to restaurants, for those who can afford it, is to eat French and Italian and American food, not Brazilian.

And so we laughed at the punters (bloated, blazered, not really British and rolling in bling, with sun-dried wives and 12st toddlers in tow) and at the size of the meat cuts, and pointed out that if they turned the lights up just a bit (it was like eating in the boot of a gangster's Buick) then they wouldn't have to serve 3kg steaks just so people could see them.

And then, the next day, just as I sat down to write this, I got a thank-you note from Rina by e-mail and decided that, frankly, not to reproduce it verbatim here would be to do you a terrible disservice. I leave it utterly unchanged, because even where Rina's occasionally eccentric English takes her into uncharted waters, she is never less than lucid, always incredibly informative and, most importantly, much fairer than I would ever have been:

“Dear Giles,

Thank you very much again for the lovely dinner. I don't know if this can be useful or not, but anyway, follow my thoughts about the restaurant:

Drinks at the bar are OK, with the expected range of “caipirinhas”. I didn't understand why they also included a large range of “mojito” though. Because of this range, it gives the impression that is a Brazilian [Rachel had this impression] but it's a Cuban drink and available in Brazil just in few places (more in São Paulo trend bars).

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