Brazil’s fascinating, multifaceted tropical cuisine makes ingenious use of everything from passion fruit to alligator, coconut milk to soursop, dried shrimp to chouriço (sausage), palm oil to black beans, goat to cassava flour, sun-dried beef to smoked shrimp, fried bananas to mashed okra, turtle to ground cashews, pork rinds to coconut-laced stews, savory meat pies to fennel-laced cornbread.

Unfortunately, you’ll find almost none of these things at Sampaio’s. Dousing a stir-fry of shrimp, tomatoes, onions, and peppers with a bit of cachaça doesn’t turn it into a Brazilian dish, nor does giving “linguine sautéed in a rosemary-tomato cream sauce” a Portuguese name. Then there’s “Estrognofe cremoso” (chicken breast sautéed with crimini mushrooms, tomatoes, and scallions in a flavorless tomato-cream sauce, again); “Porco Grelhado” (grilled pork with cherry sauce that reminds us of IHOP pancake syrup); “Filet mignon Grelhado” (a terrifically overcooked hunk of beef served with a generic-tasting “Madeira” sauce); “queijo frito” (pecan-crusted, deep-fried Brie with spicy raspberry sauce); and, perhaps our favorite “Caesar Salad Brasiliera” (hey, you can add chicken or shrimp!).

Now, there’s nothing wrong with original riffs on foreign cuisines, but these are just carbon copies of American casual-dining-chain dishes, re-named in Portuguese. The least of evils have been the various combinations of starch and melted cheese, like pleasantly crisp, soft mandioca griddles (pan-fried yucca cakes with cheese) and crowd-pleasing cheese rolls, which come warm but have a short half-life. Peixada (seafood stew) actually does integrate coconut milk, but its salmon, clams, and shrimp come shrivelly and pasty.

The space goes for a festive and brightly colored theme, and when there are people here, it sort of works, in spite of the modern-restaurant- catalog style of interior decorating. A festive outdoor patio thinly veils views over scenic Burnet Road with some vegetation. But the party ends with sticky-sweet caipirinhas without enough cachaça—mojitos are a little better. The wine list adheres dutifully to South American and Portuguese bottles, but misses the better producers in these lower price points.

When will these fake ethnic restaurants stop co-opting foreign cuisines as a way of indulging American tastes for boneless, skinless chicken breast and endless amounts of sugar? By promoting itself as a Brazilian restaurant and then denying its customers any window whatsoever into that cuisine, Sampaio’s does a disservice not just to itself, but also to the city of Austin.