la.foodblogging

Summery Whisps of Fresh and Healthy Spa Dishes

For a delightful vegan retreat, Fogo De Chao is a radiant womb that offers a serene space to enjoy a natural meal with your life mates from pilates class. Sun dappled vines caress the terra cota patio, which creates a Zen bubble, fading the rigors of everyday city life into the misty fog of memory.

Fogo De Chao is a spiritual temple offering a cornucopia of fresh organic dishes and light synthetic molded vegetable protein in the form of Chinese Power ideograms. The flowing waterfalls create a backdrop for the variety of smart drinks, each one a non alcoholic herbal enhanced shake to compliment this delicious space.

Of course, I’m lying.

The Slaughterhouse Rules

If bestial necrophilia wasn’t illegal in almost every country -including some counties in Texas- I would suggest you screw the meat before eating it, it is that good. Fogo De Chao is a war zone, a factory for rending animals, billowing smoke, and charred bones. The Brazilian churrascaria boasts a prominently lit spectacle to compete with the glitz of La Cienega’s restaurant row.

Matsuhisa, the progenitor of modern sushi, looks like a benign tumor tacked to the back end of Fogo De Chao’s loading dock, it’s tiny edifice resembling a caboose.

We followed the line of Mercedes and Lexuses into the parking lot, like a restless funeral procession waiting bury the carcass and get to the reception.

The interior space is an inviting mix of earth tones and mica chandeliers. The crowd vibe was a mix of Westside neo-hip mingling with visiting dignitaries and tourists, which pretty much describes the scene at most of the restaurants on this short stretch of La Cienega: bright hair, D&G handbags, Versace sunglasses.

There was a short wait while they turned the tables over. We sauntered over to the bar, which was a good idea since I’m not complete without my second favorite appendage, the martini glass. We were sat a few minutes later, the pager blew up, and we got our table…which was a testament to their efficiency.

Fogo De Chao operates the same as any other Gaucho meat factories. You get a coaster which is red on one side and green on the other. Gauchos, in full pantalones regalia, circulate around the room and bring broadswords impaled with charred meat to your table, and carve off an outside piece for you. When you have had enough, just flip it over to red. It’s that simple.

We got those instructions from our head Gaucho, who then invited us to take advantage of the preliminary salad bar. Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with all you can eat places -and this is just a gussied up one- there are tactically deployed delicious fillers to load you up and cut down on your primary profit center consumption, in this case, thirteen types of meat. Seafood huts are notorius for giving you hush puppies, and all you can eat stuffed potato skin assemblages. They are very calculated in the way they huck pyramids of filler crap onto your table.

Fogo is more elegant and subtle about it, they casually motion to the island and take your drink order. I walked over and found a mostly upscale presentation: hearts of palm, caeser salad, sun dried tomatoes, assortment of cheeses…but most of it I would forgo in the glowing promise of endless charred flesh, delivered tableside. I scooped up a couple chunks of parmesan and prosciutto, and finished my small plate with incredibly tender, smoky salmon.

The meal starts innocently enough. I’m with my friends, nibbling on the subtle items from the salad bar. The waiter comes over and drops a basket of fry bread. Nice, but I’ll pass. And yet. But, they smell good. But I don’t want to fill up, because they’ll make me wait a few minutes before serving us.

A waiter drops off ceramic ramekins of mashed potatoes, fried bananas and crispy polenta topped with a dusting of parmesan. More distractions. Bring on the meat!

It’s a cliché, but be careful what you wish for. It wasn’t long after picking through some mashed potato and a polenta wedge that our first Gaucho swooped by and offered us some sea salt sirloin. Mmm Mmm, slice me off some of that! Oh, this is the best, they carve delicate strips from the outside of the meat where all the flavor is, it lands in a wet plop on my plate. So inviting. So delicious.

And it was! A burst of salt flavor brought the meat to life. Halfway through my piece, another Gaucho showed up, sword clinking on his juice tray, with some hefty pieces of perfectly charred garlic beef. He grappled a garlicky hunk and slid it down the sword. It tasted like victory, serving the dead right from the valiant swords of the conquerors. The overwhelming torrent of garlic punctuated the char of the beef, it was fantastic.

And they managed to always serve us a charred slice from the outside, unless we requested otherwise. I chalked it up to either magic, or they keep taking the sword back in for more charring. In any case, they understand that this is the part of the meat that tastes the best.

As we were analyzing the beauty of the garlic beef, another Gaucho snuck up behind us and asked in a broken Argentinean accent “Would joo like zome blah bla blah?� as he gracefully arcs the swords toward us.� What did you say?�

“I zaid, bacon wrapped chicken and sausage.�

Well, who wouldn’t? Do you have to ask? Plop, a dry bacon wrapped chicken chunk bounced onto my plate. Scraaaape off a sausage from the scimitar. While the chicken was good, it had a great smoky bacon infusion, but it was a tad dry. The sausage was the weakest part of the entire meal. It tasted like breakfast sausage, not a hearty spicy sausage. No matter.

Hmm, is it me, or is it getting a bit hot in here. Ahh well, I’m not slowing yet, and, oh, you must have read my mind. What is that? Bacon wrapped tenderloin? It was tender and smoky, everything you expect from a juicy cut of tenderloin. How can I refuse.

Indeed. How can you refuse? I mean, you paid over $50 per person right?

It slowly dawned on me that this was the exact opposite of a buffet. In a Vegas buffet, it is up to the person to get up out of his seat, and ritualistically destroy his body with abject gluttony and the desperate attempt to get his money’s worth. Oh, how we devolve into feral creatures when the value of our meal is a proportionate formula based on the amount paid vs. amount ate. I call this human behavior “All You Can Waste.�

Only here, they bring it to you.

If the disk of one person is on green, it overrides the two other red ones, so the meat keeps marching down the well trodden corridors into the valley of steel. And onto our plate.

I suddenly lost my focus…everything became a blur. I would finish up one piece of meat, still have three different piles sitting there, and the Gaucho –now rapidly becoming my tormentor- would bring up another blade of perfectly cooked meat.

Wave after wave of Gauchos relentlessly invaded our tables and mercilessly pushed meat swords in our face. As the evening wore on, each piece of meat became indistinguishable from the last…yet every one delicious and irresistible. Nobody could resist eating.

It was a fearful look into Hell.

To prepare for that night –and every night’s carnage- they had to slaughter a zooful of animals. I had a nightmare that thousands of animals were piled onto a conveyor belt, delivered to a huge rending machine that ground them up, skewered the meat marinated them overnight, and incinerated the pieces. If I didn’t love burnt animals so much, I would have been disconsolate with shame.

The clockwork procession of Gauchos collapsed into a frenzied dervish of char, as every crusty strip passed our stained lips. I had regressed into an unrefined simian. We were trapped in a rapturous and dizzying hurricane of lamb rib chops, bacon wrapped chicken, sausage, tenderloin, bacon wrapped tenderloin, beef rib meat, garlic beef, mashed potatoes, polenta strips, fry bread and leg of lamb. Evidently, I committed a faux pas by heralding it as “The Lamb of God�…I still have to look that one up.

Delicious and incomprehensibly addictive, red meat turns normal people into pirhannas. Eventually, every chip was on red, the feeding-orgy climax achieved, and now we were settling down and getting a grip on our humanity once again.

As a cruel joke, or because it was the end of the night, the Gauchos still came up and offered us what was left on their weapons. In fact, it wasn’t until this moment that they offered us our fist strip of beef tenderloin and leg of lamb.

I brooded over my plate of grim destruction, then yelled at the guy “Where were you an hour ago, before I had meat piled up to the top of my esophagus?�

Nevertheless, we couldn’t pass it up. As Heidi Fleiss once said, there’s always room for more meat.

Fogo De Chao
133 N. La Cienega
Beverly Hills
Fixed Price of $50 a person for all you can eat salad bar and, oh yeah, meat.

By Zteve (see more of his posts). You can find more of Zteve's writing at his own website Gastrologica