text: Let's face it - we are all both attracted to and repulsed by the buffet experience at the same time. It's probably the allure of getting a deal by paying a fixed price and making off with more food than we should, while paying as little as possible. Enter the churrascaria - put another way: Lots 'o meat.\n\nIs it authentic? Perhaps. I really can't say. I can say that they are neither the best nor the worst such experience I have ever had, and you are probably likely to find both better and worse places to spend your money to eat (both buffet and non-buffet alike).\n\nFirst, if you're going for dinner, you may not want to eat lunch beforehand. Perhaps for several days. It's a lot of food, mostly meat. While there is a salad bar, let's face it - no one goes to a place specializing in meat, delivered to your table and gets a salad bar. It doesn't make sense on any level.\n\nWhile the salad bar isn't bad, you're simply wasting your money by filling up your gut on salad, so even though it's not bad, skip it and eat your fill of meat. If you absolutely must have salad, try the lunch instead. You can then have the salad and a smaller sampling of the meats, at a lower price.\n\nFor dinner, you get the full array of meats - unless you go for restaurant week, where they do a section between lunch and the full spread - so that's going to be full price. And those meats are brought around on these long skewers. The servers are supposed to look at the card on your table, and if the card is green, offer you food, and if the card is red, they keep going. In reality, the card doesn't matter much.\n\nIf you get their attention, they will serve you, and that is the real problem - you can generally get it, but only at certain times, and you will find that if you want to try everything they offer, it takes a very long time. Everyone wants to try everything on the menu, and so when a new skewer comes out, the meat is rapidly gone, so it takes a while for the variety to make its way around the room - you then have to put in a request. As a result, the most common meats are the ones you see most frequently. I suspect these are the cheapest (understandably - that way they make the most money), and so you have to decide if it's worth $30+ on dinner. Generally it's a losing proposition, as you get increasingly frustrated because the more interesting items are never making their way to you.\n\nStill, if you've never been, it's worth a trip - probably not worth multiple trips, however.