Every night at Fogo de Chao–the 350-seat restaurant on LaSalle specializing in spit-roasted meat–a highly orchestrated ballet takes place. Brazilian servers sporting pleated pants and boots circle the tables, carrying skewers of grilled steak, pork, and lamb. When diners show green cardboard disks indicating they’re ready to eat, a flurry of “gauchos” approaches, slicing portions to order. Guests who’ve had enough flip their table markers to the red side, and the servers back off. Continuously returning to the kitchen fire for refills, the gauchos bear their skewers more like polite Parisians than wild and woolly cowhands; still, says manager Sidiclei Demartini, “We’re working on the body language.”
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Part of a chain started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Fogo de Chao offers a prix-fixe menu based on the centuries-old tradition of churrasco, a style of barbecue practiced on the pampas of Rio Grande do Sul. “‘Fogo de chao’ means ‘fire on the ground’ in Portuguese,” says operations manager Selma Oliveira. “Once a year, in September, all the small ranches and communities would come together for a gathering, a religious event, and cook meats. Fogo de Chao honors human beings, harvest, health, food, family. The closest thing to it is Thanksgiving.”
Tending cattle and working the farm, Demartini labored until sundown six days a week. On Sunday, his family grilled their lunch on the pampas. “I was five years old when I did my first barbecue,” he says. They dug a hole, put rocks around it, and lit a fire. In traditional churrasco, the meat is seasoned only with salt, and each gaucho has his own knife, which he uses to cut pieces of meat from the spit.
Demartini’s father, mother, and sister all still work the ranch (where “women and men do the same jobs,” he says), but at age 18 Demartini got a job at a Fogo de Chao in Sao Paulo, “where we serve many, many Americans.” Three years of training taught him how Americans eat. “Brazilians like faster service. You need to tell Americans about the meat to make them happy.”
