Brazilian – The Saboscrivner

Adega Gaucha

Adega Gaucha (https://adegagaucha.com/) is an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse located at 8204 Crystal Clear Lane, Orlando, FL 32809, right in front of the Florida Mall, just south of the busy intersection of Orange Blossom Trail and Sand Lake Road. It opened about two years ago, and it is a single, locally owned restaurant, differentiating it from the similar chains Texas de Brazil (which I reviewed back in 2019) and Fogo de Chao (which I have been to twice, but never got around to reviewing). I grew up going to all-you-can-eat buffets with my family, and then they helped keep me alive through college and grad school. Because of my buffet background, I have a great appreciation for the variety and abundance of restaurants like this, even though I could never have afforded the typical decadence of a Brazilian steakhouse as a poor student. Despite the never-ending parade of patient waiters serving roasted meats on giant swords, my favorite part of this meal is always the sumptuous salad bar buffet, where I can gorge on some of my favorite foods, like cured meats, smoked salmon, and various fancy cheeses and roasted and marinated vegetables.

My wife, on the other hand, is not a buffet person, but she does appreciate a well-cooked (but never well done) steak, far more than even I do. We both like our red meat as rare as possible, and we share a fondness for marbled ribeye steaks, lamb, tender brisket, and gamey meats like bison. That’s why these Brazilian steakhouses are a rare and luxurious treat for both of us. We have gone to Texas de Brazil for a handful of special occasions in the past, and she suggested a return visit as a “last hurrah” before an upcoming surgery and a year where we’re both going to try to eat a little less and a little healthier. I suggested we try Adega Gaucha as an alternative, and I am so glad we did, because we both liked it even more than the vaunted, venerable old standby. Now I’m suggesting it to you stalwart Saboscrivnerinos, and I will do my best to point out the little differences that set this singular local establishment apart from its chain competitors.

I am happy to report that Adega Gaucha is cheaper than the “big two” chains. The full churrasco experience for dinner is $55 per person, and lunch on weekdays is $40. I would much rather eat a big meal like this for lunch than dinner, and ideally on a weekend, because I can’t think of anything sadder than gorging at a nice restaurant like this while worrying about rushing back to work in the afternoon and trying to be productive. Luckily, Adega Gaucha offers all the same stuff from the dinner menu for their Saturday and Sunday brunch, lasting from 11:30 AM until 3:00 PM, for $45 per person. To compare to the Orlando Texas de Brazil, weekend lunch from noon until 4:00 PM is $60. That $15 makes Adega Gaucha seem like a bargain, and I haven’t even gotten into how good the food and service are!

We made a reservation for 11:45 AM on a Sunday, and we were the very first party to be seated and hit the gourmet table (salad bar and buffet), so I was able to pause for some photos. Here is the charcuterie — pretty standard pepperoni, dry prosciutto and cured ham sliced paper-thin, and genoa salami folded into pretty flowers, atop a mountain of cheeses. As one would hope, they had glass sneeze-guards in place, to prevent these decadent selections from people’s germs. I grabbed some of these cured meats, along with the fine smoked gouda in the middle of the cheeses.

I helped myself to some melt-in-your-mouth nova salmon, leaving all the capers behind for diners who like them. Those white things I cut off are hearts of palm, which I have never developed an appreciation for.

This was beef carpaccio, another decadent delicacy, that I have never noticed at Texas de Brazil or Fogo de Chao.

My wife liked the sweet potato salad with raisins and dollops of goat cheese in the top left and the quinoa salad in the top right. I really liked the potato salad in the bottom left and the seafood salad in the bottom center. We both appreciated the tiny spheres of fresh, soft mozzarella cheese drizzled with balsamic vinegar in the top center. I am slowly developing a taste for beets, but I was a little too overstimulated to sample what seemed to be beet salad in the bottom right.

Back at our table, we were greeted by a basket of warm, freshly baked pao de queijo, Brazilian cheese bread — chewy little buns that my wife always likes a lot. She said these were better than Texas de Brazil’s version!

Something else Adega Gaucha does that Texas doesn’t is allow the table to select three sides. My wife chose fried yucca, which I am not into, and I chose caramelized bananas, which I figured we would both enjoy. They are so delicious. Go ahead, take those bananas!

I knew she would dig the sautéed mushrooms, so I let her take those. She liked them, but she found little marinated mushrooms on the gourmet table that she liked even better than these sautéed ones. Longtime readers know mushrooms are my Kryptonite, but I never claimed to be a fun guy.

Here is my plate after my first and only venture to the gourmet table, loaded up with some of my favorite foods in the world. Aside from things I have already discussed, I treated myself to sweet and spicy Peppadew peppers I could eat like candy (and have before), pink pickled onions, roasted red bell pepper, and one of the jewels of the gourmet table, candied bacon, which had a hint of spice and was a huge hit with both of us.

Then we turned our little red cards green to signal the gauchos to arrive with gifts of meat. (And how about Gaucho? The last truly excellent album by Steely Dan, if you ask me, but I give Aja a slight edge.)

I lost track of all the different cuts of steak the gauchos brought by our table, but between the two of us, we probably tried them all: filet mignon, top sirloin, the popular Brazilian sirloin cut called picanha, flank steak called bavette or fraldinha, and our beloved ribeye. Both of us always politely asked for rare, and the gauchos patiently offered us the rarest of the rare. I was overjoyed that none of the meats were over-salted, which is a major issue for me at both Texas de Brazil and Fogo de Chao, where on top of the encouraged gluttony, everything is ridiculously salty. I filled little metal ramekins at the gourmet table with fresh chimichurri, that wonderful, pungent condiment of oil, vinegar, garlic, and parsley, and fresh mango salsa that was tasty enough to eat with a spoon by itself. The mango salsa passed my “Would I eat this over vanilla ice cream?” test. Yes, it was that good — sweet and spicy and acidic and cool and refreshing and perfect in every way. I should have gotten a photo of it. I’m sorry!

But as good as the various cuts of steak were, for me, the highlights were the leg of lamb (also rare), the tender pork sausage called linguica, the roast chicken legs with crispy skin (capturing everything you would hope roasted chicken legs could aspire to be), and our absolute favorite meat at any Brazilian steakhouse, costela, the tender, juicy, marbled beef ribs that the gauchos serve sliced crosswise against the giant bones. As soon as the first gaucho visited us, we asked for the beef ribs, and you should too. Before we learned of the greatness of beef ribs at Brazilian steakhouses, we didn’t know to ask for it, and it rarely made appearances when we would dine at Texas de Brazil. But at Adega Gaucha, ask, and you shall receive.

Below, you can thrill to a later plate with more beef rib slices and two more delicacies that I’ve never had at Texas de Brazil or Fogo de Chao. You might have noticed the little dark round things at the top of the plate pictured above and the bottom of the plate pictured below. Those are chicken hearts, and they are wonderful, hearty (heh) fare. If you think that sounds gross, you are certainly welcome to your opinion, but they are such a delicious protein — dark and rich and slightly chewy, but so flavorful and extremely nutritious. I have bought chicken hearts before, marinated them in Italian dressing and then sautéed them, but mine always came out a little chewier than I feel they should be. I’ve had them on skewers, grilled over binchotan charcoal at Susuru and Tori Tori, two local Japanese restaurants that specialize in Izakaya-style pub grub like yakitori. But I had never had them like this, and I absolutely loved them. It’s funny that despite having all these different cuts of steak at my disposal, I liked the chicken hearts so much, but I did.

And that beautiful thing on the right is another hallmark of a meal at Adega Gaucha that I have never seen elsewhere: grilled pineapple, rich with butter, sugar, and cinnamon for a crispy, caramelized outer crust, like the best part of a pineapple upside down cake. This was a huge treat, serving as both a palate cleanser between the rich meats and a dessert. It was a damn delight, and we could not have been happier to end our meal with a few slices of the grilled pineapple, artfully cut off whole pineapples on the same kinds of swords wielded by the gauchos.

I have heard the cocktails and desserts at Adega Gaucha are as awe-inspiring as the meats and the gourmet table offerings, but we don’t drink, and we were too full for dessert, aside from that grilled pineapple. But next time (and there will be a next time!), I am ordering a Brazilian limeade, with fresh-squeezed lime juice and sweetened condensed milk. That has to be the best thing ever, to go with so many other “best things ever” we enjoyed and will absolutely return to enjoy again. In the song “Hey Nineteen” on Gaucho, Donald Fagen sang “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian, make tonight a wonderful thing.” For your friendly neighborhood Saboscrivner, hopefully less pathetic than the narrator of that song, the beef ribs, leg of lamb, chicken hearts, chicken leg, linguica sausage, smoked salmon, caramelized bananas, mango salsa, and grilled pineapple made our first visit to Adega Gaucha a wonderful thing.

CLOSED: Jaber

UPDATED ON 9.15.2021:
On September 3, 2021, Jaber announced on its Facebook page that it was closing.

***

My wife and I were recently driving through College Park, a nice Orlando neighborhood near downtown, full of really terrific restaurants. We hardly ever make it down there, and I’m not even sure why we were in College Park this time around. But traffic temporarily stopped in front of Jaber (https://www.facebook.com/jaberorlando/), a restaurant on Edgewater Drive displaying a big banner advertising Lebanese cuisine, with huge color pictures of tempting, tantalizing shawarma wraps. We looked at each other and decided to pull over and stop in for lunch — a rare moment of serendipity, without reading reviews or online hype or studying the menu in advance of our visit. Sometimes you have to take a chance, especially when it comes to lunch. YOLO, am I right? (Did I get that right?)

Looking through the unique menu at Jaber, I realized it was a Lebanese restaurant with a Brazilian twist, with multiple locations in Brazil. This was going to be an interesting fusion feast. We started out with some esfihas, which are small Lebanese pastries. The menu listed open esfihas that look like petite pizzas, and closed esfihas that are more like little pockets of dough, pinched closed in a variety of pretty shapes, and baked. The open beef esfiha in the bottom right corner above ($2.49) was indeed like a wee pizza, minus cheese. My wife ordered the folded spinach esfiha ($3.49), the triangle in the top left, that was just like the delicious spinach pies I used to enjoy so much at Gyro Plus and Falafel King back in Gainesville, over 20 years ago, and much more recently at Tony’s Bakery here in Orlando. As much as I like Greek spanakopitas on thin, crispy, flaky phyllo dough, I always prefer this Lebanese style spinach pie enveloped in warm, soft, chewy dough. Jaber’s folded spinach esfiha was much smaller than the one from Tony’s Bakery, but it was still warm and soft and chewy and fresh, with the cooked spinach so well-seasoned inside, with garlic, lemon, and possibly even nutmeg, among other savory flavors.

My wife’s favorite, however, ended up being the folded sausage esfiha that I ordered ($3.49), the tempting pinched pastry in the bottom right of the above photo. It was stuffed with crumbled calabresa sausage (which I first encountered at another local Brazilian restaurant, Mrs. Potato) and olives! That was an interesting choice that she just loved. The soft dough was my favorite part, so I’m glad we split that one. And finally, in the top right of the above photo, we have a fried kibbeh ($3.49), the lemon-shaped fried shell of cracked wheat with crumbled, seasoned ground beef and minced onions inside. I liked this one more than she did because it was so oniony.

I am always up for anything with lamb, so I went with the lamb shawarma ($17.89) — a thin wrap (more like a lightly-grilled tortilla than the fluffy, puffy pita bread I’m used to with gyros) stuffed with thin slices of seasoned lamb, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and tahini sauce, like a Lebanese burrito. It was tasty, even though I prefer the huge gyro from Mediterranean Deli that is around half the price. The lamb shawarma came with fries which were similar to McDonald’s fries, but could have used a lot more salt. I was really hoping for better fries, on par with Mrs. Potato, but those were some of the best fries I’ve ever had.

I was able to resuscitate these fries by shaking a liberal amount of this “Chef’s Sauce” onto them. It was a delicious hot sauce that definitely breathed some life into them. I asked our server Bella what was in the hot sauce, and if they sold bottles of it. She came back with “peppers and garlic,” and a bottle was $11. Sorry, I think that’s way too much to pay for a bottle of hot sauce, even though it was good.

This was the Syrian rice ($7.50), one of several different international rice dishes on the menu. It sounded the best for sharing — rice and angel hair pasta, fried in butter, kind of like a rice pilaf from heaven. Some Turkish restaurants serve a similar buttery rice, and we both ended up loving it.

My wife was feeling overwhelmed by the large two-page menu in a new restaurant, but it was an easy choice once I pointed out the combo meals. She loves steak — far more than I do, far more than most men do — so she chose combo #7 with picanha ($17.99), a thin-sliced Brazilian steak, reminiscent of Cuban palomilla steak and Argentinian churrasco, if that helps place it in context. Unlike those, picanha is served with the fat cap attached. It was seasoned with garlic and herbs, and it arrived sizzling.

Her picanha steak combo came with even more of the unsalted fries, a mound of white rice, and a cup of stewed red beans. This was so much food, we brought these fries home along with the rice and beans, and I ate everything over the next couple of days, doused with some hot sauces from my own collection.

My wife also ordered a cappuccino with Nutella around the rim ($5.79), which would have been a great dessert, but she asked for it at the beginning of our meal and sipped it throughout. It was messier than she expected, with the thick, sticky Nutella around the rim of the cup, but she did what she could to scrape it in and stir it into the cappuccino. I didn’t try this, but she liked it, and how could it not be great?

I honestly don’t know when we will return to Jaber. It’s in a part of Orlando we rarely venture out to, and even though our food was good, I thought it was kind of pricey for what we got, compared to similar dishes we like from elsewhere. The esfihas and the rich, buttery Syrian rice were definitely our favorite parts, and I would still recommend it for anyone located closer to College Park, Winter Park, or downtown Orlando looking to try one of Orlando’s more interesting fusion restaurants.

One thing that would bring me back would be their All You Can Eat Esfihas offer for $19.99 (plus tax and tip, of course), on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 10:00 PM and Sundays from 12:00 to 4:00 and 5:00 to 10:00 PM. I really did like the esfihas we got, and I wanted to try others from the long list of options. Plus, they are small, and I have faith in myself to know I could put A LOT of those away and more than get my money’s worth on a future visit. The Jaber Facebook page posted about the all-you-can-eat special back in February and said you have to make reservations. I don’t know if they are still running this special, but it would definitely be worth investigating. If I see you there, it will probably be on one of those days!

Mrs. Potato

I’ve been hearing good things about the Brazilian restaurant Mrs. Potato (https://www.mrspotato.net/) for years. Located at the busy intersection of Conroy and South Kirkman Roads, Mrs. Potato opened in 2012, but earned well-deserved national acclaim when it was featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives in 2017. Chef-owner Rafaela Cabede has been a regular, pleasant presence on the Orlando Foodie Forum on Facebook, and I’ve always meant to make it out there to try it, but it’s pretty far from me. Luckily, on a recent trip to the mall (something I usually dread), my wife and I decided to give it a shot. As a toy collector, I should have taken a photo of their wall of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head figurines, but we were both so hungry, it didn’t even occur to me until it was too late.

There were three things I really wanted to try on Mrs. Potato’s menu: chicken catupiry, carne seca, and calabresa sausage. You can get all three of them stuffed inside rosti potatoes, a Swiss dish that is essentially a giant stuffed hash brown, but I couldn’t possibly eat three separate rostis, much less justify ordering them. (As you will learn, I couldn’t even finish one.) But you can also get two of those things inside Brazilian empanadas called pasteles. I always love empanadas, so I ordered two of those to share with my wife ($4.50 each), and saved the third filling for the rosti. I was pleased that the pasteles have a golden-fried, crispy flour shell, similar to the Cuban empanadas I grew up with, but quite a bit bigger.

The first pastel I cut open was not one of the ones I ordered! It contained ground beef, hard-boiled eggs, and olives, reminding me a bit of Cuban picadillo. I told our server I didn’t order the ground beef pastel, and she whisked it away immediately. I wish I had eaten my half, or at least taken a bite to try it, because I’m sure it ended up in the trash. I hate wasting food, even if it isn’t my fault. Weeks later, and I still feel bad about this.

This was one of the ones I ordered: seasoned, pulled chicken with catupiry, a soft, creamy, tangy Brazilian cheese. It was delicious. Chicken and cheese are sure to please.

We both liked this pastel with carne seca, Brazilian cured beef jerky with a bit of cream cheese. It was more like shredded, braised beef than the dry, chewy jerky I’m used to — kind of like the Cuban dish ropa vieja, but not tomatoey like that. It was very good. Guy Fieri raved about the carne seca on his show, and I get it.

My wife loves steak, so she ordered the picanha ($18.99), which is top sirloin, cooked rare. It came out more medium rare, but was still very tender and well-seasoned. Her sides included yucca fries that we both thought were just okay, and also twice-dipped, Belgian-style French fries, which were among the best fries we’ve ever had! I’m not surprised that a “potato house” restaurant would have good fries, but these were better than good. They are definitely among the best fries in Orlando. When you visit Mrs. Potato, don’t miss them, even if you order another potato dish!

Anyway, I ordered another potato dish: the aforementioned rosti ($14). It is huge, and more than a little intimidating! I always argue that Waffle House has the best hash browns anywhere, but the rosti was like a serious gourmet version of those.

After trying the chicken catupiry and carne seca in pasteles, the third thing I wanted to try was the calabresa sausage, so I got that stuffed inside my rosti. The sausage came crumbled inside that mountain of crispy shredded potatoes, along with melty mozzarella and provolone cheeses and thin-sliced sauteed onions. I should have asked about the sausage, since I was expecting slices or larger chunks of an Italian-style sausage, due to the name, not crumbles. But it was tasty, don’t get me wrong. A tomato-based sauce would have worked really well here, but not ketchup. I might put ketchup on my Waffle House hash browns, but these were crying out for a finer caliber of red sauce. It was still delicious — just super-heavy. The rosti, stuffed with sausage, cheese, and onions, is a meal you need a nap after eating, and I only ate about half of it at the restaurant and took the rest to go.

Whenever there’s a new or unfamiliar soda, I have to try it. I’m sure I could have found Guarana Antarctica at Bravo Supermarket (and maybe even Publix), but it was here ($2.75), and I was thirsty. It tasted a little like fruit (but not any specific, identifiable fruit, since I’ve never tried guarana berries on their own), and a little like bubble gum or cotton candy. It was unique, yet strangely familiar. Not sure if I would get it again, but I’m not sorry I tried it.

For dessert, my wife ordered the churros ($4). It came with an order of two, but she grabbed one before I could snap this shot. I took one bite, and it was an okay churro with plenty of cinnamon and sugar dusted on its crevice-covered surface.
However, the warm, rich caramel sauce they came with was one of the most delicious sweet things I’ve ever tried. She wasn’t into it, so that ended up being my dessert, which I scooped up with the teeny-tiny spoon.

I wrote this review on one of those rare Orlando days when we have some chilly weather, and I saw Mrs. Potato is offering an all-you-can-eat Soup Festival in the evenings for $14.99. I was disappointed that wasn’t an option at lunch, because when we were there, I totally could have gone for all-you-can-slurp soups — not so much for eating soup until I’m sick, but because I love trying new things. I reached out to Rafaela on Facebook and asked what kinds of soups are available in the Soup Festival, and she replied that these are the four everyday soups:
• Black Bean Soup
• Portuguese Sausage and Kale Soup (Caldo Verde)
• Creamy Heart of Palm
• Loaded Potato Soup

But on any given day, there would be four other rotating soups, including these and more:
• Creamy Corn, Chicken and Bacon
• Broccoli and Cheese
• Beef and Vegetables Soup
• Peanut Butter Cream (sweet)

Anyway, Mrs. Potato (or Mrs. Po-TAH-to, if you must) serves really delicious Brazilian comfort food, with an emphasis on the potatoes. There are baked potatoes on the menu too, with the same variety of toppings, but I strongly recommend the rostis, since that’s such a unique dish, compared to baked potatoes you could get almost anywhere. And don’t miss the pasteles, those amazing fries, and that caramel sauce!

Chain Reactions: Texas de Brazil

Back in the day, when we all could eat more than we can now, my dad was a huge fan of all-you-can-eat restaurants, especially the many Chinese buffets around Miami in the ’80s and ’90s. He knew each one’s strengths and weaknesses: which ones had the best spare ribs, the best fantail shrimp, the best house special fried rice, and so forth. He was a beloved regular at a lot of those places, and even though he wouldn’t consider himself a foodie, it was his quest for the best versions of a dish and the best bargains around South Florida that started your Saboscrivner on my persistent path as a culinary explorer, reporter, and reference librarian.

But beyond the Chinese buffets, the height of luxury was the all-you-can-eat Brazilian churrascaria, Texas de Brazil (https://texasdebrazil.com/), a decadent steakhouse where uniformed gauchos walk a never-ending parade of grilled meats to your table, impaled on giant swords, for you to enjoy until you slip into a meat coma. This was our destination for the most special of special occasions, our most rare and revered restaurant. There were multiple steaks, including filet mignon (some wrapped in bacon!), Brazilian picanha, and flank steak, parmesan-crusted chicken and pork, Brazilian sausage, lamb chops, leg of lamb, and a star player I’m saving for last because it is the best.

Beyond the meats is a sumptuous salad bar, if one could even call it that — one of the most bountiful, bombastic, breathtaking buffets imaginable, where the actual salad is a mere afterthought alongside fancy salami and prosciutto, fresh mozzarella orbs, spreadable Boursin cheese, fancy Spanish manchego (sheep-milk cheese), cold-smoked salmon, chilled marinated shrimp, California rolls, roasted peppers, caramelized garlic cloves, and other roasted, grilled, marinated, and pickled vegetables. You also help yourself to luscious lobster bisque, and the gauchos also grace your table with soft Brazilian cheese buns, mashed potatoes (I usually ignore both of those), and fried bananas served with cinnamon and sugar (big fan here).

Note that all this decadence doesn’t come cheap. The all-you-can-eat dinner is normally $49.99, or you can opt for just the salad bar (which is honestly my favorite part of Texas de Brazil, and would be a fine, full meal on its own) for $24.99. Monday through Friday, lunch is somewhat discounted at $34.99. Still, it’s way too extravagant for us more than once a year (and believe me, we don’t even do this once a year).

But we did last year, and we did again this past weekend, thanks to a very special month in Orlando called Magical Dining. Every September, our official tourism association Visit Orlando sets up Magical Dining with dozens of participating restaurants all over the city, generally mid-to-upscale establishments. Each restaurant announces a prix fixe menu with a few options to choose from: appetizers, entrees, and desserts, and the price is $35. This is a real bargain at most of these restaurants, and it gives people who might not normally treat themselves a chance to try some delicious dishes at new, unfamiliar, and highly vaunted restaurants around town at a discounted price. And best of all, $1 from each Magical Dining bill goes to a number of worthy local charities!

My wife and I rarely take part in Magical Dining. As you can tell from this blog, we generally gravitate toward more casual restaurants, and very few of those participate. At these higher-end places, sometimes there isn’t an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert on the Magical Dining menu that appeal to both of us, and we figure we’d rather hold out for a special occasion and order our top choices off the full menu, not a small, curated list of options. (Of course, you can still order off the regular menu at any of these places during Magical Dining.)

But Texas de Brazil might be the best deal of all, because you get the full salad bar, the full unlimited meats, AND a dessert (which normally costs extra) for the excellent discounted price of $35 (plus tip, of course). That’s a bargain, for all the same stuff plus a dessert! My wife loves steak, we’re both crazy about lamb, and I go nuts for sausages and that spectacular, stupendous, sublime… sensual salad bar. We squeezed in a reservation for the last weekend of Magical Dining, which I strongly recommend you do next year.

We arrived before our 5:00 reservation, in time to hit the salad bar buffet early, before it would be ravaged by ravenous rubes. Dig the artful presentation of beautiful cured meats:

Some of the Saboscrivner’s greatest hits on this buffet plate, even chilled couscous salad in a vinaigrette and some of the best potato salad ever. I am careful not to fill up on carbs, but I can’t make a rare visit to TdB and not load up a plate with these wonders. Rest assured, dear readers — I was a member of the Clean Plate Club.

Meanwhile, the gauchos were coming around, so I was building up a supply of meat to last me some time, while going through my buffet items. This plate includes medium-rare flank steak (left), two lamb chops (top), two slices of picanha (right), part of a sausage (bottom, next to the fried banana). GO AHEAD, TAKE THESE BANANAS!A lot of the meats tend to be more done than we both like, so we always ask for as rare as possible, and end up content with medium rare. I find all of Texas de Brazil’s meats to be extremely salty, so keep that in mind too.

But here’s the star of the show, both of our favorite meat: BRAISED BEEF RIB, sliced right off the giant bones in front of us. If you go to Texas de Brazil, it’s very possible you might not even realize this was one of the meats being walked around. It doesn’t circulate often, probably because it’s an expensive cut that takes a long time to prepare. And as far as I can tell from having had two or three TdB lunches, they don’t offer it at lunch time! Last year for Magical Dining, we learned to very politely request it as soon as we were seated, and then to get at least two slices once it makes its way to us. I love braised, stewed, and other slow-cooked meats even more than grilled steaks, and this beef rib is fork-tender. It seriously shreds apart with just the side of your fork, and then completely melts in your mouth.

I’m proud to say that neither of us wasted any food, but I was stuffed after finishing everything you saw above, and my wife got equally stuffed from a lot less (but she didn’t mess with the buffet like I did, minus a couple of those spicy marinated chilled shrimp). I had ladled us each a bowl of lobster bisque at the beginning, but ended up having hers at the end of my meal, because it’s too good, and it would have been a shanda to waste a drop.

And after all that, we were still entitled to desserts, included in the Magical Dining deal! We got our desserts boxed up to take home, because we couldn’t eat another bite. There were two selections, and we each chose the one you would expect us to choose, if you know us.

Unfortunately, my wife’s chocolate cake was very dry and disappointing:

My Brazilian cheesecake was pretty good, because even bad cheesecake is pretty good, but it was a small sliver:

Bonus pictures of the desserts we took home back in 2018, the last time we were here (also for Magical Dining Month):

Key lime pie that was much better than either of this year’s dessert options:

Bananas Foster pie that was incredible, that I was wishin’ and hopin’ they would offer again this year:

Coconut chess pie that was also spectacular:

I don’t remember which two were included, and which one we paid extra for just to try it, but all three of these were awesome, and far better than this year’s two dessert choices. But then again, I’m a pie guy.

So here are your takeaways:

Magical Dining is a wonderful thing, and you should totally treat yourself next September, whether it’s here or one of Orlando’s other great participating restaurants.
Texas de Brazil is an incredible indulgence, a sensational splurge, a truly unique and celebratory destination for carnivores, gourmands, and just plain old hungry people. Heck, if you’re doing a low-carb diet, it could be a great restaurant to cut loose in, since meat and most salad bar offerings are the star attractions and carbs are supporting players. My wife and I love it, but now we’re good for another year, or probably far longer. We got it out of our systems for a while, and no, that wasn’t a colon-related joke.
Or was it?