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!