Meat Orgy

Donna and I were in the Minneapolis area this weekend for Macy's last soccer tournament.  I am still working on the photos and videos from the games, so in the meantime I am going to talk about Fogo de Chao, the restaurant we visited with our friends and hosts Tim and Jenny.

It's a Brazilian place that takes South American cuisine and forces it to marry the idea of a buffet at the point of a shotgun and then jumps in to a three-way with the concept of dim sum, all for the price of a small condo in the south of France.

First, you go through a buffet line full of salads, breads and sundy other distractions like mushrooms and asparagus, caesar salad, cheeses, prosciutto and seventy-nine other things too meat-free to mention.  However, like the chips and salsa at a Mexican joint or the bread sticks at an Olive Garden, these things are meant to distract you from the meat.

Once you finish screwing around with the buffet, it's time for endless Parade of Meat.  Fogo de Chao features fifteen kinds of meat, each of which is brought to your table on skewers and offered as many times as you like by people who probably make six-figures as waitstaff.  You signal your interest in more meat by flipping over a little coaster from red to green.  Green signals your desire for more decadence while red means you need a minute to rest before partaking again.  Come to think of it, that is exactly how whorehouses work in Thailand.

There's sausages and filet mignon, two kinds of lamb, three kinds of chicken, several kinds of pork (including a parmesan-encrusted dish that was incredible) and many variations on good ole cow.  In the end we were impressed with everything; the food, the service, even the wine suggestion was right on the mark.  We shared a dessert that was simply sublime.  Which was good because I wasn't kidding about that French condo thing.

Here are some of the conversations we had (reconstructed from memory):

• "I think Fogo de Chao is Portugese for 'meat orgy'.  That's what they speak in Brazil, right?  Portugese?"
• "I want to go to the bathroom but my bladder is clogged with meat."
• "I wonder if the servers are part of a pecking order defined by which meat they get to present.  Like, if you're carrying the sausage, does that mean you're the new guy?"
• "I think I'm a vegan now."
• Server: "Would you like some dessert?  We have a lovely 'chocolate meltdown' with seven kinds of chocolate."
  Me:  "Is there any meat in it?"

Good stuff, to be sure, but the kind of place you can only go to once a year or so.  I take it as a good sign that shoveling that much animal carcass into my gullet made me feel not-so-good for about sixteen hours or so.  I'm pretty sure that a few years ago I would have eaten twice as much and pissed off my digestive tract half as much.