Fogo de Chão Brazilian Steakhouse – San Jose, CA

377 Santana Row #1090

San Jose, CA 95128

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Located in busy Santana Row, Fogo de Chao serves up a variety of tasty meats as a Brazilian Steakhouse. As this was our first foray in this format of dining, we were extremely excited. We made reservations the day before just in case they were busy. We opted to visit for lunch instead of dinner because you get the same type of food for a better price. When we arrived, the hostess quickly led us to our table where servers took our drink order and explained how the dining experience worked. We were also instructed that there was a market salad bar area where we can also grab food that was not being passed around.

We started our meal by visiting the market salad bar area where we got essentials such as rice and broccoli as well as some tasty smoked salmon and sliced meats. There were plenty of other food items and salads, but we wanted to focus on the meat that would be served. When we got back to the table, we flipped the specially marked coasters to green to instruct food servers to stop by our table to provide us with meat. We had various cuts of steak, pork, chicken, and lamb come by throughout the meal service. We had to flip the coasters back to red to prevent us from getting too much food. It was a genuinely fun experience to have people come by with a large skewers of meat carved onto your plate. Out of all the meats, the steak cuts were the best, especially the juicy garlic steak. Some bacon wrapped meats like the bacon wrapped sirloin and bacon wrapped chicken were juicy and tasted OK too, but the straight cuts of meat were tastier. The pork items varied in taste, but they were overshadowed by the beef. The lamb was also tender and gamey. During the meal, we also tried the Brazilian lemonade, which utilized lime and condensed milk, which was different and refreshing. At the beginning of the meal, servers did bring some side dishes that included mashed potatoes, polenta, candied bananas, and cheese-infused rolls, but we didn’t try them until the end of the meal to prevent us from getting prematurely full. The sides did taste good, but out of all of them, I really enjoyed the cheese bread. Since we came for a birthday, we were also able to select a free dessert, so we chose a chocolate mousse cake, which was decadent, moist, and delicious.

Overall, Fogo serves up delicious cuts of meat with amazing service. Meat servers rotated around frequently and were very nice. Other servers checked on us frequently and refilled our waters. We liked the large variety of items on the market salad bar area, and really appreciated the availability of white rice. If you want to eat somewhere nice, but also wanted lots of delicious food, then Fogo would be a great place to go as it was worth every penny.

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