highway robbery

The missus worked really hard on cleaning the house yesterday, and I always appreciate that a lot. She also ironed a lot of things for me, and I think she's realized that that's the quickest path to melting my heart. Ironing takes a lot of time, and most of my clothes have to be ironed. Anyone that saves me time like that will quickly win me over.

As a "thank you" for all her help yesterday, I decided to surprise her with dinner at Fogo de Chão, a place she'd be asking to go for a while. Of course, this was after subjecting her to Best Buy and Guitar Center, two of the places on the planet she likes the least, but I digress. If you've never been to or heard of Fogo de Chão, it's a churrascaria, or Brazilian steakhouse. There is a salad bar, and various meats that are cooked on a spit are brought to your table throughout the meal, as long as the card they give you is turned to the green side. Essentially, it's a buffet heavy on high-quality meats.

We were first introduced to the churrascaria concept in Utah, where we used to go to Tucano's (Provo) or Rodizio grill, which was formerly in the University Mall, but has since gone out of business. Neither was ever very cheap, but you could go for lunch and save a bit of money. When we go back to Utah, Tucano's is usually very high on our short list of places to go. Anyway, Fogo de Chão isn't open for lunch on Saturday, which meant that we had to go for dinner. Also, it's downtown, which means that we had to drive farther than usual and then pay for parking.



The food was great. I would say the meat was of higher quality than Tucano's meat, but Tucano's salad bar is better. The guys with meat came out more quickly than the Tucano's guys, and they weren't shy about coming back to our table. Becca quickly turned her card to the red side as she was quickly overwhelmed by the pile of meat on her plate.

All was well with the meal until the bill came: $102. $102??? With no drinks, appetizers or desserts, and without tip factored in? Even for dinner, Tucano's was never anywhere near that expensive. I knew it was going to be expensive, but I suppose I wouldn't have been as shocked if I had bothered to look into the pricing before the meal. What we had was the only dinner option Fogo de Chão offers, and even when they sat us down and ran through the explanation of how a churrascaria works, there wasn't pricing on anything, so I never really thought about it until we were all done. Last night will definitely remain our first and last dinner at Fogo de Chão (unless some wealthy friend or family member wants to take us there, of course).

So, goodbye, Fogo de Chão. You were good, but not $122 good.