Birthday Dinner of Meat

So for those of you who don't know, my birthday was on Thursday last week. My birthday itself was pretty quite, but Friday my mom drove down from Philly and we went out to dinner. I was not really sure where I wanted to go. My mom likes the harbor, but I am kind of over the whole scene (though I still need to go the aquarium). Then I remembered my friend Bryan had gone to this steakhouse called Fogo De Chao. I will say this was one of the craziest, most amazing and filling meals I have ever had.



Ok, so the place in in the Harbor area, underneath the new Best Buy (which is the worst Best Buy of all time). It is set up a little strange as there are very large doors with no windows or any form or visual clue as to what is on the other side of the door. This will come into play later on in the story. So we head inside and the place is enormous. It seats 300 people. We are seated really quickly and our waiter came over to the table. It was at this point that I noticed all of the activity in the place. Our waiter began to describe the salad bar and I tuned him out because I was in awe of seeing the servers running around the restaurant. I mean full sprint. This would not have been such a big deal, however, servers at Fogo have a couple of things in their hands as they run, a large knife and swords with meat. THEY WERE RUNNING WITH KNIFES AND SWORDS. It looked like they were playing basketball with the amount of jukes and jives these guys were performing. I could tell this was going to be an interesting meal.

We took a visit to the salad bar. It was pretty good, white asparagus, prosciutto ham, tomato and mozzarella. They even had hearts of palm and artichokes. I probably went overboard, even after being warned by the waiter to "go light". It was at this point that the real action happened. At Fogo, they give you a chip that you place on your table, one side is green and one side is red. Here is a picture:

When the chip is on the red side, nothing happens. Then you turn it to green and all hell breaks loose. The men, running with knifes and swords, begin coming to your table asking if you would like the delicious wares. The meat just keeps coming, until you turn your chip back to red. Beef, Chicken, Lamb, Pork, they have something like fifteen cuts of meat. Some of the highlights were the Fillet Mignon, both plain and wrapped in bacon, and Sirloin flavored with garlic. It was delicious, and when you are done what is on your plate (or before that) you turn your chip back to green and the crazy process starts all over again.

It was amazing. As the night went on we decide to begin to point at the small children walking around the room and occasionally mentioning the likelihood that they would be impaled by a knife or sword by a speeding server. Towards the end we were being very picky about the meat we allowed onto our plates. I think we got about ten different cuts and most were excellent. It would have been nice to have some sort of steak sauce, au jus, mint jelly, something to go along with all of the meat, but I can understand the lack of such things. You really did get a true taste of the meat.

When we were all finished my mom turned to me and said that she may now be a vegetarian, which is completely untrue, but I can see taking a borderline veggie to Fogo and having them turn the corner all the way to micro vegan. On the way out I went to open the door to the resturant and definetly hit some guy smack in the face with the door. He wasn't hurt, but he was in shock. I was like, my bad, the design of this door sucks. The guy actually agreed with me... he was like, they could put a window in here or something. I should go around hitting people with things and blaming it on bad design. I think that could be fun.

Overall this was a great meal, and for what you get, it is worth the price ($42). I hope to go back, not really soon, I don't think my arteries can take it.