Fogo de Chao

BEEF!!

This is a celebratory post. This post owes everything to the Kansas Jayhawks. For without the Jayhawks' unexpected overtime victory in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, I would not have received a fair sum of money from winning my friendly little tournament pool. Without this sum of money, I wouldn't have gone, in celebration, to spur on our government by immediately spending it all at a restaurant with Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood. And without the sudden need to find a good, fairly expensive restaurant that I've never been to before, I would not have gone to Fogo de Chao, the namesake of this post and one of the premier all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses in the River North area of Chicago.

Fogo is a strange place. It's one of those places that makes you love and hate something at the same time. We'll get to this in a bit.

So the first thing we did at Fogo was to get introduced to "the way things work here" as our very friendly and well-spoken introductory waiter stated. The fact that it's all you can eat and so on. Then, we ordered the house specialty drink, which is basically a special brazilian mojito made with sweet rum. Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood had the strawberry version, which was a bit too sweet, but oooohhhh so delectible. Then we went up to the salad bar - and of course, it's a shame because this salad bar was probably the best I've ever seen. And you don't want to waste your available stomach volume on high-quality ruffage. Then, once we were finished and READY, we turned our little signal discs over to green meaning "Bring the Pain." From there it's mostly a blur - a lot of filet mignon, some wonderful lamb, a lot of stuff wrapped in bacon, some very nice sausage, and fried bananas that I could have eaten all night if I felt like purging to make some space. I remember unbuttoning my pants at some point during the meal, and achieving a hightened sense of respect for beef and its preparation.

When you go to an all you can eat restaurant - and especially one like Fogo, where they actually focus on the QUALITY of the food as well as quantity, it is very important that you eat as much as physically possible. And this, I believe with all my heart. I ate very slowly on purpose - and it worked - I was able to put away more than I thought I could have, and then, all of the sudden, I didn't necessarily feel full, I just new that if I shoved one more piece of cow in my mouth I would parish. So - I pushed the plate away, closed my eyes, put back two more fried bananas, ordered a cappuccino, drank it, then gave up. Because I know when to say when. And as I got up and walked out of the restaurant, looking at all the other suckers who were about to go through the same ecstacy and excruciating pain that I just had, I began cursing beef, just as I had praised it during my food-drunken stupor of a meal.

I don't want to see a slab of beef for at least another 3 weeks.

But ask me tomorrow, and I just might want to go back to Fogo de Chao.

On a side note - while at Fogo, who sits down at the table next to us, than none other than the bassist from world-renown rock and roll group and Chicago hometown boys, WILCO: JOHN STIRRATT. Now THIS was a cool, VERY Chicago experience!

Newcastle Table-Climbing Watch and A Taste of Heaven

With so many topics on this blog now (3) it's going to be hard to keep lines of thought. But I'm going to do my best. I've only been writing about one a week though so it can't be all THAT hard. Today we've got two topics.

Yesterday, Newcastle played Reading which always had "tough match" written all over it. We've come off four great performances in a row, the last two of which both tabbed 3 points. All of Tyneside was on a high, and pretty much everyone fully expected to get another win, but Reading was a team who could kill any giant. They always come to play, they play with their heart, and they play difficult, physical football. I rearranged plans with my bud on Saturday just to watch this match. So they had better perform for me. And that, they did. We went ahead after about 20 minutes with another beatiful Oba Martins goal. On 43 minutes, Michael Owen made it 2-0, and Mark Viduka finished the scoring for the afternoon in the second half, and Newcastle ended up being OVERWHELMING winners 3-0. Habib Beye, the ex French leaguer, had a fantastic match, and was involved in seemingly every play going forward.

Newcastle are now 12 points clear of the drop zone, and the fear that I felt just a month ago feels miles away. It's quite clear, when you look at the schedule, that Keegan came in at CLEARLY the most difficult point in the season, with not only the toughest part of the schedule, but also the most depleated side at his disposal. We lost consistently to teams above us. And now we're consistently beating teams below us and around us. This is absolutely typical for a mid-level team, which is what we are. We're no giant killers. We don't deserve to be in Europe. But we also don't deserve to be relegated, and now it's clear that we won't, and the boys can look forward to the next 5 matches and realistically think that we can win any one of them. Not only that but we can think about the off season and who we'll buy, and how we'll get back in to Europe, either with this coming season or the next.

For my second food entry, I'm actually going to write about food this time. Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood (her name is getting longer) and I went to a wonderful place called "A Taste of Heaven" (5401 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60640 / 773-989-0151) for brunch this morning, for our second time. Now, let me say, I'm a breakfast lover. Since my mom came out with this scrumptious sausage/bread/egg/cheese casserole thing in the late eighties, I've been hooked on breakfast, and while I don't eat it every day, I know a good one when I taste one. And this is a good one. All the food is made on the premises, the service is not only fantastic, but so fantastic that it actually elevates the dining experience from great to amaaaazin'. It's in a very interesting area of Chicago called Andersonville, a place where Mrs. Architecturefootballandfood and I seriously considered calling home, which used to be mostly lesbian population but is now primarily inhabited by gay blokes and young families. It's a great place to stroll around and some of the best little boutique shops and restaurants are there. It reminds me a lot of Park Slope, Brooklyn, if anyone is familiar. The customers at this restaurant usually fit that bill to a T, and the wait staff do everything they can to make every single person there as jovial as possible. It always puts a smile on my face -- and I haven't even gotten to the food yet.

Today I had the peaches and cream french toast and the missus had the special omellette - turkey sausage, spinach and goat cheese. I had some reservations about the french toast being too sweet before I ordered it, but decided to dive in and oh my goodness, was I happy I did. the french toast was almost more of a french cornbread, and the peach preserves used were thick and sweet and made me feel warm all over. But the crown jewel of the dish was the homemade whipped cream cheese that they slathered all over half of the plate. It was light, fluffy, and not too sweet - and made the dish sing.

The wife's omellete wasn't as nice as the french toast - but really, what could be? It was amazing as well though - it tasted as good as you could imagine, came with some nice hasbrowns (which, to be fair - this place doesn't have the best hashbrowns in my opinion - which I'm an absolute stickler for - but they're not half bad) but with most breakfast dishes in this place, they serve a green salad with green beans and vinigarette dressing on the side. It freshens up every plate and gives it an attitude all its own.

So if you're ever in the far north Chicago neighborhood of Andersonville on a Sunday morning (or any morning I think) PLEASE stop by my favorite place up there called "A Taste of Heaven." There's seating outside, it's a fantastic area, the wait staff will make you feel like family, and you'll have a meal like you haven't had in years - or months - or decades - depending on how well you like to eat....

Schlenkerla Rauchbier

Of course, for my first food entry, I choose beer.

Schlenkerla Rauchbier is something they call a "smoked" beer. Brewed in Bamberg, Germany, in a 700 year-old cellar, this beer is truly like no other beer I've ever tasted. I won't go as far as to say it tastes like bacon - but it certainly does taste smoked. In the brewing process, the hops are mixed with burning beech-wood logs to achieve a serious smokey flavor.

This is certainly NOT a beer for a summer afternoon after you've mowed the lawn or played 90 minutes of football. But imagine early November, after you've raked leaves, and you come back in your den, peel off your thick coat, and you want something to warm you up. Yeah, sure, you could take a hot chocolate and sit with a teddy bear and cry about your ex-boyfriend, of you can open a Schlenkerla Rauchbier, sit back in your aged calfskin recliner and eat some cow.

This beer comes in 1 pt bottles, rather than 12-oz bottles. This is fantastic if you prefer to drink your beer from a glass, because it means you can pour twice. And anyone who doesn't love the action of pouring a beer, clearly doesn't love drinking a beer.

Tonight, I had this beer paired with a wild boar burger at my favorite burger place Hop Haus, right underneath my house in Chicago. It's got burgers ranging from classic and strong to surprising and wild, and the boar burger is somewhere in the middle. But for each burger, they've got a beer pairing, and it's got one of the best beer lists of any restaurant I've EVER been to. No Miller lights here - not even Newcastle Brown Ale. It's all interesting, hard to find stuff, and they all are scrum-diddly-umptious.

So next time you feel like warming yourself up on an adult, sophisticated brew, go for the Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier.