“Who is the gaucho, amigo?
Why is he standing
In your spangled leather poncho
And your elevator shoes?
Bodacious cowboys
Such as your friend
Will never be welcome here
High in the Custerdome.”
–“Gaucho” (1980), written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, performed by Steely Dan.
If you’ve ever been to an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse (commonly called churrascarias), you are familiar with the servers (commonly called gauchos, named after Brazilian and Argentinian cowboys) showing up at your table with a never-ending parade of grilled meats on swords and serving whatever you request, as many times as you wish. While the titular gaucho in Steely Dan’s song was a garishly clad, unwelcome weirdo, the gauchos at these restaurants are a welcome sight, and they will seduce you with steak, beguile you with beef, and charm you with chicken.
Chima Steakhouse (https://chimasteakhouse.com/), located at 7830 West Sand Lake Road on Orlando’s “Restaurant Row,” is one of these Brazilian churrascarias, similar in concept to international chains Texas de Brazil and Fogo de Chao and Orlando’s locally owned and operated Adega Gaucha and Boi Brazil. They are all decadent experiences, where you can eat like a king until you get the meat sweats, but I can’t eat like I used to, back in my 20s. (Shame, because I have a much better budget now to treat myself to dining out.)
But my favorite part of all the all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses, even moreso than the gauchos and their tireless meat delivery system, is the sumptuous salad bar all these restaurants have in common. As if nonstop meats weren’t enough of a draw, they also offer a variety of fresh salads and house-made dressings, fresh, roasted, grilled, marinated, and pickled vegetables, fresh fruit, hot rice and potato dishes, prepared salads (Chima has a mayo-based potato salad with chicken and a quinoa salad, among others), Brazil’s beloved national dish feijoada (a black bean stew full of beef and pork, which you top with toasted yuca flour called farofa), smoked salmon, fine imported cheeses, fancy cured meats, and more. And you know your friendly neighborhood Saboscrivner — some of my favorite foods in the whole world are smoked salmon, cheese, and cured meats!
Chima’s salad bar is top-tier. Here you see their gorgeous platter of folded slices of melt-in-your-mouth cold-smoked salmon, perfect and untouched since we got there right when the restaurant first opened for lunch. In the top left, you see their chilled kani and mango salad, kani being the sweet and tender surimi, or “krab” you may have enjoyed in California rolls. Below that is their seafood salad, which includes shrimp, scallops, tender squid rings, grape tomatoes, red onions, celery, and capers, tossed in a light and refreshing vinaigrette dressing. I loved all of this, especially on a hot September day.
And of course, I couldn’t leave these delectable cured meats behind! Not when there are thin slices of peppery Genoa salami, rich and salty prosciutto, and tender, fluffy mortadella with pistachios to choose from. I’m a shark when it comes to charcuterie. 
And these were paper-thin slices of beef carpaccio, served chilled, topped with pesto sauce, grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, and capers. This was another hit, as far as I’m concerned.
By the way, during the week, if you just get the salad bar at lunch, it is only $20 per person, which I consider one of the best deals in town, with all of this bounty. I don’t get many weekdays off work, but you better believe I will return to take advantage of that deal. My wife and I went to Chima on a Saturday with the salad bar on our minds first and foremost, but we found out that on the weekends, the salad bar costs $36. However, for lunch, the complete churrascaria experience is $54 — much cheaper than it is at dinnertime — so for an additional $18, we decided to treat ourselves and go for the meat as well. We don’t go to these places often, but I was happy to try as many things as I did. And this way, I can offer my dozens of readers a more thorough and detailed review! Yes, I did this for YOU. You’re welcome!
This was my plate of salad bar goodness, with all of the above, plus fresh mozzarella and gouda cheeses, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, orzo pasta salad with pesto, and what they had labeled as “Brazilian vinaigrette,” that reminded me of a pico de gallo with all the finely chopped multicolored vegetables.
When we first sat down, our jocular server brought us this pao de queijo, Brazilian cheese bread that is always a little chewy and gummy. My wife absolutely loves these, but I gotta admit, for a fella who loves bread and cheese and especially cheese on or in bread, they don’t do much for me. It’s a texture thing, as well as having my buffet-loving dad’s voice in my head, sharing his wisdom, cautioning me “DON’T FILL UP ON BREAD!”
The pao de queijo were soon joined by cinnamon-dusted fried bananas (top right), creamy mashed potatoes (bottom left; neither of us messed with this), and fried polenta (bottom right). I had a piece of the fried polenta just to try it, since none of the other Brazilian steakhouses serve these; it was okay, but I won’t bother with them in the future. The bananas were my favorite, but I would have preferred them a little caramelized with sugar rather than cinnamon, like my beloved maduros. 
These days, I mostly eat lean meats at home: chicken breasts (boring, but healthy), lean pork loin (a blank canvas for infinite variations), and ground turkey, which I usually make into meatloaf or chili. I hardly eat beef at all anymore, especially because it is so expensive these days, but I figured I would go hard on protein and take advantage of Chima’s offerings.
The very first meat that was delivered to our table was filet mignon. Our server asked us how we like our meat, and we both said rare, so all the gauchos were very conscious of only bringing us rare cuts of beef. (Luckily, they didn’t deliver us any rare chicken.) While I failed to photograph the filet, it was so incredibly tender. I almost never eat steak, and especially not filet, but I was impressed by the almost buttery texture.
Next up, I tried both cuts of chicken Chima offered: grilled chicken thigh marinated in their house-made aji sauce, and a beer-marinated chicken drumstick. Usually I skip the chicken at these Brazilian churrascarias, because it tends to be on the bland side (and it’s cheaper than beef, so they walk the chicken around more often, hoping you’ll fill up on it), but these were amazing. I could have happily made a meal of just these two kinds of chicken.
That is rare flank steak on the right, which was delicious, but much tougher than the perfect filet.
I held off on eating the next few meat deliveries so I could take a pretty picture for y’all. That’s how much I care. On the left, carnivores will recognize the famous Brazilian picanha, or top sirloin, which is a standard at these sorts of places. On the top, you have a rich, fatty, tender cut of beef rib (costilla), cut right off the huge bone. This is my favorite cut of beef at churrascarias, and it is one of my wife’s favorites too. Next to it are two different Brazilian sausages. Most of these restaurants just offer the more pinkish-hued savory sausage on the bottom, but Chima also had a cheddar sausage (on the top), full of melty cheddar cheese that oozed out when I cut into it. I really enjoyed that one.
On the right, you can see marinated and grilled shrimp, which I’ve never noticed at Texas de Brazil, Fogo de Chao, or Adega Gaucha. These were also terrific. And in the middle, those lovely things are grilled slices of Brazilian coalho cheese, topped with a little honey. These were so nice as palate-cleansers between the various rich and salty meats. Adega Gaucha and Boi Brazil serve this cheese with a thick and sticky guava sauce, which I honestly prefer, but they were great with the honey. When the honey hit that Brazilian sausage, it was also a flavor sensation, reminding me of how Special Agent Dale Cooper loved it when maple syrup collided with ham on his breakfast plate on Twin Peaks.
These were slices of pineapple, grilled and covered with cinnamon, which served as a nice, light dessert after all that heaviness. I love pineapple in any form, or pineapple-flavored anything, but this was another rare time when I preferred the more caramelized, less cinnamony grilled pineapple at Adega Gaucha.
Neither of us had expected to have such a huge and heavy lunch when we headed down to Chima, but faced with paying $36 for the salad bar versus $54 for the full experience, I think we made the right call. I’d do it again, but honestly, I am much more likely to return on one of my rare weekdays off from work, so I can take advantage of that gourmet salad bar for the low, low price of $20.
How would I rare Chima compared to the four other Brazilian churrascarias I’ve been to? Well, I’ve never gotten around to reviewing Fogo de Chao (after four visits) or Boi Brazil (after one visit that will probably be my only one). I think Adega Gaucha was my favorite of all of them, and I can’t say anything bad about it, but I honestly think Chima might be my new favorite, and my wife agrees, having been to all of them except Fogo. The atmosphere at Chima was incredibly nice, and the service was top-notch. I appreciated how they remembered our preference for rare steak and how they took requests, like when we asked about the beef rib. They were also forthcoming with the better cuts of meat, even though I actually loved the chicken here. A lot of the other restaurants walk around a lot with a parmesan-crusted pork loin that I always find to be very dry, but nobody even approached us with that one at Chima.
I think I liked all the meats here the best for one major reason: they were much less salty than all of their competitors, which is another reason I like doing the salad bars alone so much. I like meat, I like salt, but most of their rivals oversalt the meats like crazy. Not Chima. Everything was seasoned and cooked perfectly. That chicken! That shrimp! That filet! Those sausages! And yes, the salad bar was unparalleled. I give Chima my Saboscrivner Seal of Superiority, and I know I’ll be back at some point. (It’s across town from us, but maybe that’s a good thing, so I’m not tempted to try again tomorrow.)
