My personal standard for restaurants has evolved over the years, but these days it's pretty consistent, and, I think, reasonable. I like restaurants that are at the very top of their game (Gourmet's top 100 is a reasonable barometer); I like restaurants that specialize in food that I will never, ever cook myself (barbecue, pho, damn good burgers, migas); and I like restaurants with freakish gimmicks that are impossible to duplicate at home, provided the food is good.
Fogo de Chao, the Bahia-based churrascaria, falls in the latter two categories. The Austin branch of this mighty chain opened recently, and we went there last night to celebrate my recent promotion (from shit pay and no responsibilities to only crap pay and lots of responsibilities). It was my understanding that Fogo deals in something like dim sum, except Brazilian and with hunks of meat instead of shumai and chicken feet, and I was correct; however, it is much more than that. The Fogo Experience is the ultimate in gluttony and gourmandism; it's deeply weird and yet comfortingly familiar; and it's faintly ridiculous in the best possible way.
Here's how it works: you
show up and are ushered to your table by one of the approximately one
thousand wait staff with whom you will interact in some fashion during
your stay. This person suggestively sells you a couple of
jaw-droppingly expensive capirinhas
(a shame about the price tag; the capirinha may be my favorite cocktail
in the world, and I've met a few), and gives you The Drill.
The drill is that on your table, next to each place setting, is a little doohickey that looks like a coaster, green on one side and red on the other. Green means "go"; red means "whoa". This doohickey is the cue for the roving masses of stern Latino men brandishing swords laden with giant hunks of charred meat to avoid you or descend with alarming rapidity. There is also a small set of tongs at each place. The tongs are there so you can catch the meat as it falls off the swords, and spare the tablecloth (rather a futile enterprise, but a cute conceit).
That meat. The meat is good. The meat is very good. It isn't USDA Prime or anything, but it is beautifully done -- rotated over a hot fire until it reaches a perfect balance of caramelized crunchiness and translucent bloodiness. There are fifteen kinds of meat, of which our favorite, by a landslide, was the top sirloin roast. The ribeye, oozing cholesterol, was also very good, as were the lamb chops. The house special garlic beef is still knocking over anyone who speaks to us today. The chicken, pork sausage, and filet mignon were forgettable, and we were crying "uncle" long before the ribs showed up. I was extremely impressed with how deft the servers were at accommodating our preferred level of doneness just with their knifework, hewing close to the surface of the meat for well-done and deeper for rare. I think I may have ordered more meat than was sensible, just to watch them do this. It was like a floorshow for anyone who likes meat.
With the meat come a selection of faintly peculiar side dishes, which you don't know you want until you are eating them. There are little squares of deep-friend polenta that taste like the avatar of Fried. Actually, they taste like that heavenly frying smell you encounter on fairgrounds and run all over the place stuffing unsatisfactory things in your face trying to capture. There are fried bananas, superfluous garlic mashed potatoes with cheese, and some divine but deadly little greasy popover-esque buns, also with cheese. (I have added them to my internal catalogue of snacks I will serve if I ever own a gastropub -- a lengthy list by now, and one unlikely to ever see the light of day except maybe in a blog entry sometime). Fortunately there are not a whole lot of these things; if Fogo served them in conventional American-sized portions there would probably be lawsuits.
So what do you do when your arteries are screaming for mercy and your eyes are tearing from this onslaught? You turn up the red side of your coaster and hit the salad bar. Fogo's may be the best salad bar I have yet encountered. There are not a great many items; this isn't some epic casino-style smorgasbord. But the selections are all startlingly good, a little weird, and just the thing to combat the meat. There are beautiful butter lettuce and glorious pickles, prosciutto and smoked salmon (somewhere between hot-smoked and lox, dry but easy to slice) and salami and smoked cheese and Swiss cheese; there are fresh hearts of palm and artichoke hearts, free of stringiness, that have never seen the inside of a can, and really good potato salad and really good shiitake mushrooms in a garlicky marinade, and olives, and a transcendent cucumber salad, and, glory of glories, a big basket of rough-hewn chunks of real Parmesan cheese. I have never been tempted to steal from an all-you-can-eat buffet before I saw that Parmesan; I have a bad habit of eating it in chunks at home, and it's so expensive that I always feel guilty. Apparently Fogo has a salad-bar-only price point, and I am tempted to go down there on the regular to take advantage of it.
If you survive all this, there is dessert. Our creme brulee was lousy. The prix fixe, $45 a head for the meat option, does not cover dessert or drinks, and it sounds reasonable until you learn that the lousy creme brulee costs $14. I'd say skip it, and roll your sorry ass on home for Haagen-Dazs instead. You can and should beat the system.
It is difficult to describe how awful I feel today. Churrascaria is terrible for you, and my very bones are informing me of this fact. But once in awhile, eating a whole cow in charmingly theatrical circumstances -- with the world's best pickles on the side -- is just the ticket.
8/10
Go again? Once a year, please.
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