A Lot of Very Good Chow
Fogo De Chow
600 East Pratt Street
Baltimore, MD 212002
410-528-5292
This restaurant is immensely popular despite its high end
price tag. It’s quite different from any other restaurant we’ve dined at and it
was really quite a bargain at the $30 per head price. The theme is Brazilian
steak house and it is quite unique.
Four of us dined there, sampled everything there is to eat,
had a moderate bottle of fine Zinfandel and escaped for just over $200 including the generous
tip. Parking added $14 to the cost of the evening and was our second mistake of
the evening because we opted to park ourselves in the adjacent mega-lot and wound
up paying $4.00 more than the cost of using the very efficient valet parking
provided in front of the restaurant on Pratt Street, just opposite the Power Plant.
This is one busy place and the streets all around the harbor
area were abuzz with tourists. There were many people waiting outside the
restaurant with those red light beeper thingies they give you to alert you when
a table is ready. I hate waiting and I hate the beeper things so my first
thoughts were, oh no, another place that takes reservations but they are
meaningless. Wrong! We checked with the Maitre’d and were seated immediately. A
server appeared immediately at our table to explain how the restaurant operates and what was
included in the Restaurant Week menu. Please bear with me if you have been
through this routine before but it essential to dining at Fogo de Chow and
unlike anyplace else; there is even a video at their web site to explain the rules of the house in advance.
All service is team based. After your initiation to the
restaurant by the first server, the food is brought to you by at least a dozen “gaucho”
servers whose clue that you want to stop by your plate is a coaster sized chit
with a red side for “hold the chow” and a green side that signals “bring it on”.
Water appears; side dishes arrive delivered by new faces throughout your meal.
It’s a non-stop parade of various meats throughout the evening and even though
the place was packed, we never once felt we had to wait for additional
servings.
The Restaurant Week menu turned out to be the regular menu
for Fogo de Chow. That made it quite a
bargain since a meal routinely costs $48.50 per person, not including beverages,
liquor & dessert. Two of us had the nerve to order dessert. How anyone can
have room for dessert after a meal at this restaurant befuddles me but our
friends managed to absorb the large servings of caramel cheesecake and key lime
pie, which leads me to our mistake #1 of the night – going to the salad bar.
This is NOT the salad bar at Applebee’s! This is an unbelievable
spread of food selections that would serve as a full meal if you only sampled
1/3 of them. It begins with the thinly sliced prosciutto ham and salami;
followed with an assortment of cheeses, followed by…well here’s just a few of
the things I sampled: thick slices of local tomato with fresh buffalo mozzarella
balls, several kinds of sweet, hot and grilled peppers, hearts of palm, incredible
chicken salad, olives, smoked salmon, sundried tomato wedges, several types of lettuce
and green leafy things, tender asparagus spears… none is mediocre; all is spectacular
and plentiful. Stay away from the salad bar! You can’t do the salad bar justice
and the meat entrees too. There is just too much of both for people to eat
unless you are one of those professional brunch diners who will make it a three
hour dining experience and slowly eat and digest, eat and digest and so on.
You could go to Fogo de Chow just for the salad bar but then
you’d miss out on the array of grilled meats their reputation is founded on. This
restaurant is very big and very noisy but you will not be abandoned by any of
the gaucho servers as soon as you flip your chit to its green side. I know that
I sampled only ½ of the meats offered but have no regrets other than I wished I
had room to try them all. Before I begin to list the array of meats that are
sliced and served tableside, let me say that everyone at our table thought each
serving to be extraordinary, done to our preference, moist and quite flavorful.
Throughout our meal servers brought side dishes of mashed
potatoes, caramelized plantains and miniature cheesy popovers. They just keep
coming as you sample your way through meat selections that include tender pork
parmesan, sliced top or bottom sirloin, chicken breast wedges wrapped in bacon,
small filet mignon pieces wrapped in bacon, pork spare ribs, prime rib of beef,
leg of lamb, fat chicken legs, pork sausages. If you like your beef rare, the
server slices off from the rare portion of the beef on his skewer. If you are
the kind who likes the crunchy, well done end piece of the prime rib or sirloin,
you get that and as much or as little as you’d like of it. You have some of the selection placed
on you plate, flip the chit to the red side and the servers bypass you. Want
more, flip to the green side and the parade of meat begins again. It’s all a
tad sinful but enormously popular gluttony. By the way, the sinners are almost
all dressed quite casually; a bit ridiculously so if you ask me but this is the
acceptable trend in some restaurants these days. There is no accounting for
taste and style in attire anymore.
I certainly recommend Fogo de Chow. The restaurant didn’t
miss a beat in service or food preparation. It may not make it onto my list of
regular diners and dives but it adds a delicious new dimension to the dining
experience. Be sure to have a reservation and know that the salad bar is
available on its own regularly for $24.95. The chicken salad alone is worth it.
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