Having been to Fogo de Chao locations in NYC and San Juan before, I thought I had a good idea about what to expect when I showed up for the salad bar today for lunch. First of all, the staff seemed utterly confused by why I was there - I said, hi, can I have a table for lunch? And they seemed to not know what I was asking, which was terribly puzzling.
The lunch buffet is £11.95 before service charge (why am I paying a service charge for a self-serve buffet?) and includes both the 'salad' bar and a small selection of hot dishes.
The 'salad' bar (and I'm putting that in quotes for a reason) was the saddest excuse of a salad bar I've ever seen. By that I mean there was no lettuce lol. How do you have a salad bar without lettuce? It was incredibly odd. So I had a plate of veggie odds and ends like beets, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, etc but had nothing cohesive to tie them together. There are also about a dozen sauces intermixed with the salad bar but no labels for any of them (some are obvious eg ketchup) but it would have been nice to know what everything else was...
There was no cheese or charcuterie as other Fogo de Chao locations have. That was a huge disappointment as that's my favorite part of the buffet usually.
The hot dishes were all quite bland. I had broccoli and cauliflower with bechamel that had absolutely zero flavor. The mashed potatoes were reasonably tasty.
Giving 2 stars because they have about 10 types of olive oil that you can use for your bread which was really nice and not something I'm used to seeing.
Overall unless you're going for the full churrasco experience, this is a hard pass. read more