Fogo de Chao - Naperville
Fogo de Chao is for people who love meat, and lots of it. There is a fixed priced menu that includes the immense salad bar, sides (warm pão de queijo, crispy polenta, mashed potatoes, caramelized bananas) and unlimited meat, or you can order individual servings of meat and seafood off the menu.
Throughout dinner service, Fogo de Chao’s gaucho-attired servers cruise the dining room, looking for small disks on the tables that diners can turn to reveal the color green (meaning “send more meat, please”) or red (meaning “I’ve had enough meat, thanks”). The fiery grills in the back of the restaurant send out a steady stream of beef, chicken, pork, lamb and sausage, and the servers really know their stuff: they will custom-cut you a piece of meat anywhere from rare to well-done and all points in-between. And those servers will keep coming to serve you more until your flip your two-color disk from green to red. The gaucho servers will go over all this to you when you take your seat.
Read MoreBefore the meat extravaganza kicks off, stop by the salad bar for a Brazilian cornucopia: exotic vegetables, imported cheeses, smoked salmon, cured meats, seasonal soup, as well as classic Fogo feijoada (traditional black bean stew with sausage) served with rice, fresh orange, and farofa (baked yuca flour). After you’ve eaten your vegetables, you can start into the cavalcade of carnivorous delights: filet mignon, prime top sirloin, top sirloin, bottom sirloin, ribeye, pork ribs, prime lamb steak/leg/chops, pork, beef ribs, bacon-wrapped steak, chicken and spicy pork sausage. If you’d rather enjoy an individualized portion, there’s Wagyu New York strip steak, dry-aged tomahawk ancho and several seafood selections, including mango Chilean sea bass and pan-seared salmon.
To pair with all this, you could not do better than a good Brazilian wine or cocktail.
