An Offally Good Blog

Offal Good (Click for Blog link)

Chris Cosentino, Chef de Cuisine at Incanto Restaurant (where I absolutely cannot wait to dine at again) in San Francisco has just started a new blog about cooking with all the nasty bits that most of you would throw out.

I’m not much of an offal man myself, but Chris is an incredibly talented chef and I’m sure there are some great posts in store for us in the near future.

Chicago Dining: Fogo de Chão

Fogo De Chao
661 N La Salle Dr, Chicago, IL
(312) 932-9330

In addition to Alinea, Malnati’s and Chicago Hot Dogs, the other place I really wanted to go during my trip to the Windy City was Fogo. In Northern New Jersey, we have our pick of perhaps at least two dozen Brazilian churrascarias, but Fogo de Chão has the reputation for being the very best in the entire country, in terms of both the quality and variety of its meats and excellent salad bar.

A group of us eGers and LTHers had a real blast on a Wednesday evening consuming mass quantities of meat and drinking dangerous amounts of Caipirinha cocktails (click for video)

eGullet Society manager Ron Kaplan (Ronnie Suburban) enjoying the salad bar.

The salad bar at Fogo is indeed one of the best I have ever seen at a churrascaria, but don’t get distracted by the rabbit food. You have plenty of meat to eat ahead of you.

These are fried polenta sticks with cheese, also very good.

Fried bananas.

Caipirinha, made with the Brazilian cane spirit cachaça, muddled limes, crushed ice and powdered sugar. Addictive and very dangerous.

The meat parade begins.

Meat!

Meat…

More meat…

Lamb Chops

Beef Ribs

The meat lands on the tables so fast and the servers come at such breakneck speed, that you barely have enough time to get the food off your plate. The photos I managed to take were just the items I was quick enough to photograph, there is at least a dozen different types of meat in the rotation.

This is a papaya/guava mousse dessert with creme de cassis on top. Its meant to help aid in digestion of all the meat.