Fogo de Chao Sunday March 28th 2010

Fogo de Chão

The children have been on Spring Break with us for the past two weeks. There is a restaurant that we have wanted to take them to, but the trouble is that it is a serious meat restaurant and as Emma is going through a vegetarian phase of life at the moment, we decided that it was a total waste of time to take her to it.

So we waited until she had gone back to the United States before taking Charles and on Friday we went. He leaves tomorrow for the last ten weeks of high school and so it was a good choice to take him to.

It is classified as a “churrascaria” which translates as a Brazilian Barbeque. These are very popular in Brazil and most towns will have a selection of them. When you arrive, they bring “couvert” which at this restaurant, basically consists of baskets of bread, mandioc, chicks’ hearts and sausage. I guess they want you to fill up on carbohydrates and offal before eating the really good stuff. The secret is to avoid the bread, sample the rest and wait for the main event.

Then there is the most amazing salad bar. It is easy to go totally over the top on salad as well, but because it is an all inclusive price, you can go back to the salad bar as often as you want to.

Each person at the table has a disc by their place setting. The disc has red on one side and green on the other. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that green means “yes please” and red means “no thank you”. The minute the waiters see the green disc, they descend upon you, almost like a SWAT team to serve you meat.

Now, the meat is barbequed as I have said, and is served on enormous sword like knives. By your knife and fork are a pair of tongs and the idea is that as soon as they start to carve the meat, so you grasp the cut end with the tongs and then they carve the rest. As the meat falls away, so you have it safely grasped in the teeth of the tongs and so it doesn’t fall onto you and make a mess. You can always spot the newcomers who haven’t quite got the hang of it.

The restaurant is very clever. Somehow, they always manage to serve the cheaper cuts of meat first. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but they work on the principle that better to fill you up with chicken and pork rather than start with the Filet Mignon. But for the initiated, the secret is to wait because eventually the serious cuts of meat will appear.

This is my third “Fogo de Chão”. For Charles it was an initiation and I think, quite a success. He definitely got his money’s worth but then again he is a teenager with hollow legs. The secret to the success of the evening is to starve yourself all day and vegetarians need not apply.