Fogo de Chao (pronounced fo-go dee shoun), the Brazilian churrascaria at 1513 Wynkoop Street, just three blocks down the street from Rodizio Grill, Denver's first Brazilian steakhouse at 1801 Wynkoop Street, opens tonight for dinner, but last night, I got a sneak peek of the meat of the matter and lived to tell you all about it.
Which may not seem like a big deal to you, but considering that, at one time, there was not an inch of negative space on my plate, thanks to the mounds of steak, lamb, chicken, pig and more pig that came at wicked-fast speeds from the knife-wielding servers, my aliveness is nothing short of a miracle. I truly believe that it was the ten glasses of red wine (a really lovely La Posta malbec) that enabled me to wake up this morning.
Anyway, if you know anything about Brazilian churrascarias, then you know they're all about meat, in this case fifteen cuts of meat, presented tableside on skewers or on wooden cutting boards. To compensate for all that artery-clogging gluttony, there's a thirty-item salad bar that vaults everything from greens and mozzarella balls to roasted tri-colored peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, smoked salmon and hearts of palm, albeit from the can.
It's an enormous amount of food (most of it very good) that the staff at Fogo de Chao seems to understand, insomuch that they give every table a set of red and green coasters: Red ones to signify that you need to seriously stop and breathe and green circles to alert your server that you're ready to go forth and conquer.
If you want to test your own limits and gut-busting boundaries, Fogo opens this evening at 5 p.m. and will continue to serve dinner seven nights a week until we all collapse from the sheer excess of it all or until they run out of skewers, whichever comes first. The steakhouse will open for lunch on Tuesday, August 3.
See more photos of last night's dinner at www.westword.com/slideshow/view/28067078.
