The Gaucho Way of Preparing Meat

This week is Restaurant Week in Baltimore, where a number of restaurants offer $30 menus that may or may not be a steal compared to their usual prices. The best deal this year was probably Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian charruscaria offering various cuts of meat delivered right to your table by an endless string of waiters.

Basically how this works is that you’re seated and invited to sample the salad bar.  Pretty good, and a pretty good selection (including salmon, cheeses, pickled peppers and more), but the main attraction comes when you return to your table. Fried polenta, mashed potatoes, caramelized bananas and pão de queijo await you as side dishes, and as soon as you flip your card from red to green you will be beset by the so-called gaucho chefs who will carve an assortment of meat off giant skewers right at the table.

The meat was generally excellent, and at first Tado and I indulged liberally in anything presented to us. But after something like half a pound of meat the worst pangs of hunger had abated and we started getting a bit more discriminating. This engendered a little game of hide-and-seek with the gauchos: I’d flip my card to green, but keep an eye out for gauchos carrying subpar items (say, chicken breast or top sirloin) and quickly flip it back to red if they started to approach our table. As I worked my way past the first pound of meat I took it a step further by staying red until I saw something acceptable (filet mignon, basically) and then going green. Of course I could (and did) simply avoid unwanted cuts with a “No thanks”, but this way was rather more entertaining.

Of course there was no way of not taking this experience too far, and by my reckoning I had about two pounds of meat by the time I threw in the towel. Certainly more than I’ve had in total since I arrived, having gone effectively vegetarian about half the time. But as someone clever once phrased it: it’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year that will really get to you, but what you eat between New Year and Christmas.