The Brazilian Steakhouse

As promised, here's a peak into our Brazilian Steakhouse adventure.  We went there with a classmate and good friend of Peter's, Keaton (who also whalloped the boards :) and his wife Jamie, and we had a blast.  There are at least three restaurants like this in Chicago, but Keaton heard that Texas de Brazil is the best, so that's where we went.  A disclaimer: the pictures are a bit dark and not super clear because there was weird lighting and my phone is less than professional, but you'll get the idea.  Here's how it works:

For a set price per person, you get unlimited access to the huge "salad bar" and all the meat you can handle.  Before you say, "this sounds a lot like Old Country Buffet...how is it different?", the food is just, amazing.  The salad bar has tons of specialty vegetables, cheeses, ahi seared tuna, salmon, salads, soups, traditional Brazilian dishes, I could go on.  Then the meat...oh God the meat...

There are at least 15 different styles of meat: bacon wrapped chicken breast, prime rib, filet minion, lamb chops, loin of lamb, special Brazilian sausages, pork, you name it.  They use a special grilling/cooking process for each kind, with Brazilian seasonings (salty and a little spicy), and put them on huge skewers.  Gauchos wander around and slice a sample of anything you want off their cut of meat.  That is, when you are ready for it.

We got these tokens, one side red and one side green.  I'm sure you can extrapolate what to do with them...After our first trip to the salad bar, we decided to flip from red to green (Jamie exclaimed, "Oh God I'm scared!) and sure enough, about 5 gauchos descended on our table, offering us amazing samples.  You can turn them down of course (if you're dying for a lamb chop you might say no to the chicken guy), but it is super fun to see what they bring around.

You could literally eat all day, but obviously this is a super bad idea.  We did a round at the salad bar, a round of meat, and then repeated before we threw in the towel.  Really fun, obviously satisfying, and a great way to celebrate Keaton and Peter's accomplishments on the optometry board exams.

We decided that we'd take the long way walking home to shake off some of our fullness...and I'm glad we did.  We were slow moving, but it was a beautiful night and we took some fun pictures.