Our Year of Living Steakishly: May, Boi Na Braza

With the Best Man and his The Girl, we headed to Fountain Square for a night of Steakish Living, our first in the series to benefit from the company of another couple.

If you've not been to a Brazilian steak house - and we hadn't before this journey - you should know that it's certainly a different dining style than that of any other steakhouse that we've hit on our travels. There is no menu, no choice of sides, no need to ask for the meat cooked a certain way.

Instead, the sides and salads and antipasto are on a four-sided salad bar, free for the grazing. One side had typical salad fixings, another warm sides (sauteed mushrooms, whipped potatoes, black beans, cauliflower with cheese, soup), the third and fourth antipasto choices (roasted red peppers, asparagus, salami, cheeses). We were welcome to take in as many and as much of these as we wanted - at the beginning of our meal or throughout.

ChemGuy's choice from the four-sided salad bar
All of the starters were very tasty, the mushrooms and black beans, in particular. With so many sides - salads, sides, appetizers - none of us were able to sample all of the choices, but we each agreed that they were all solid choices with very few of them rising to a level of excellence. In general, we treated the opening course largely as something to be sampled lightly but not to be indulged in with any real gusto.

The meat was the thing, and we needed to save room.

The Best Man's choices from the same four-sided salad bar. Note the red octagon at the top left of the photo. That'll be relevant later.
Once the salad choices were done, we moved on to the meat course...courses...the endless meat course.

When we were ready to bring on the carne, we flipped our card from red to green. Once the green was showing, the gauchos who were wandering the churrascaria (I swear, I'm not making up these terms) immediately began stopping by the table. They brought by seventeen (the host told us the number, I certainly wasn't counting) different meat options:

• bottom round
• bacon-wrapped filet
• bacon-wrapped chicken breast
• garlic beef
• prime rib
• lamb
• chicken legs
• and a bunch of others that started to blend together
• sausage

Seriously, the meat started to blend together pretty quickly. There was meat and meat and some meat.

After a while, we flipped back to the red to make the meat rain pause and took a few minutes to actually eat some of the carnage. With so many choices, The Girl and I began by simply accepting every meat offered to us, trying every style of meat. The Best Man, on the other hand, had been to Boi na Braza before and was a bit more selective, knowing which meats he enjoyed the most and which would simply be taking up much needed space on his plate.

Most of the meats came in smallish pieces, typically two or three ounces at a time, all served on large skewers and slid off onto our plates. I like my steak more closer to rare than medium, and the small sizes of the meat pieces seemed to keep this from happening. Instead, most of the meat - the beef, at least - more in a medium well level of doneness. Even the larger cuts, from which slices were cut and laid onto our plates, struggled to stay at even medium, and none of the meats had the rich crust that comes on an outstanding steak.

Admittedly, the endless supply of meat as well as the vast variety of available seared flesh was attractive, but Boi na Braza felt a bit like a higher quality CiCi's where the value was to be had in the quantity rather than the quality of the offerings.

The Best Man's plate of meat.
Somebody's meat plate.
Go Meat!After taking down probably a pound of meat a piece, we had the foolishness to try out the dessert menu by splitting apiece of their caramel cheesecake, a dessert too large by half, especially at the end of an evening of gluttony.

To the rankings, steakish readers:

• Appetizers/Dessert - 8 - The dessert seemed mass produced. The full salad bar made for a lot of options, many of which were very tasty.
• Steak - 6 - The massive amount of meat and huge variety makes up for some of the middling quality, but not all of it.
• Side dishes - 7 - see description of salad bar.
• Atmosphere - 7 - Nothing special - nice decor but nothing special.
• Cost - 4 - At $47 per person plus $8 for the dessert, it's slightly above the middle of the road cost.
• Service - 8 - The lack of a traditional waiter made things tough to evaluate. The meat servers seemed to come from nowhere when the card was flipped to green. Drinks were never allowed to be low.
• Minus 5 - It's not a steakhouse - period - end of story.
• Total score - 35 (out of 60)

It's not a steakhouse.

I don't know if I'd mentioned that yet or not.

No big, single steak on my plate. No medium rare. No menu.

It's a buffet, a high quality buffet but a buffet none the less.

On to steakhouses in Washington, D.C for June.