valentine's, a week early

My loving husband is abandoning me on Valentine's Day for the 2nd year in a row. Work, work, work. Fortunately for him he made it up to me by taking me out to this delicious restaurant. And to be honest, not fighting with St. V crowds is rather nice.

Where did we go? Well, we usually eat vegetarian most of the week. Every so often I get an incredible urge to eat meat. Beef, particularly. I just feel like I really need to eat meat. With this in mind I did some research and found Guri do Sul, a Brazilian steakhouse. (More specifically, a churrascaria.)

If you don't know, this is a place where you get what you want from the salad bar and then roving gauchos (that's what they called them) bring sword-long skewers of meat and slice it onto your plate. Constantly. Every minute you are being asked if you want the Garlic-Spiced Beef, or the House Special Center Cut, or the Lamb Chops (yuck!) or...you get it right? Before five minutes are up your plate is completely full.

Let me go back to the salad bar, though.  It's not your typical iceburg lettuce, baby corn and ranch line. It had hearts of palm, steamed asparagus and green beans, mozzarella balls, pickled red peppers, marinated mushrooms, two types of crab salad, and more. Oh so much more. It was more along the lines of an antipasto bar. My favorite was the real wheel of Parmesan-Reggiano carved out into a bowl in which you could take out chunks of the salty cheese. That's when I knew I had landed in a little corner of heaven.

(My salad plate, pictured above, taken in the dark dining room with my hubster's camera. I know it's less than ideal photo-ing, but let's just consider ourselves lucky we got any pictures at all. The only reason I remembered to take this one was because I hadn't eaten yet. Once their delectable food hit my lips, all other thoughts left my mind.)

The best part was because I ate so much meat, I was satiated before my tummy distended into the country of Painland.The meal was awesome and I recommend the next time you have some a lot of money to blow, treat yourself to Guri's.

Well, if you're in the NW Houston area, that is.