The most important object at Fogo de Chão is not a twelve-inch carving knife or a skewer sagging under a crusty cap of picanha. It is a coaster. One side is green, the other red. Green tells the gaucho chefs circulating through the dining room to keep coming. Red buys a pause. With one flip, a guest can turn the restaurant’s defining spectacle on or off.
That little signal explains more about Fogo than a menu does. Most steakhouses make diners commit to one cut, one temperature and one plate. Fogo sells a moving stream of choices: beef, lamb, pork and chicken, fire-roasted and carved at the table. The customer edits the experience in real time. The room feels generous, but the choreography is disciplined.
Invite the next passador to stop, describe the cut and carve a slice.
Let the plate, the conversation and perhaps good judgment catch up.
A ritual with an operating system
Fogo traces its beginning to 1979, when brothers Arri and Jair Coser and brothers Jorge and Aleixo Ongaratto opened a simple wooden restaurant near Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil. The founders had grown up around the ranching country of Serra Gaúcha, where churrasco meant meat roasted over an open flame and hospitality gathered around it. They also learned restaurant work in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo before turning that tradition into a concept.
The company opened in São Paulo in 1986. In 1997 it crossed into the United States with a restaurant in Addison, Texas, a Dallas suburb. That move matters: Fogo did not merely export Brazilian food. It translated a regional ritual into something an American group could understand immediately. The gaucho clothing, open flame, skewers and tableside carving supplied theater. The coaster supplied control.
The full churrasco loop
Behind the show is an unusually visible production line. Gaucho chefs butcher, season and roast. Passadores carry the finished cuts through the room, reading dozens of tiny signals. Guests sample and compare. Meanwhile, the Market Table handles another kind of movement: diners can get seasonal salads, vegetables, charcuterie, fruit and feijoada without waiting for a server. Traditional sides such as caramelized bananas, polenta and warm cheese bread fill the gaps.
“The heart of Brazilian hospitality is about creating moments of genuine delight and generosity.”Barry McGowan, chief executive, on the 2025 rewards launch
The format solves a familiar group-dining problem. A table can contain the adventurous eater, the cautious eater, the person avoiding gluten and the friend who mostly wants salad. Each can assemble a different meal without forcing the party into separate restaurants. The Market Table is naturally gluten-free as a format, and Fogo publishes dietary guidance for vegan, vegetarian and other preferences. It is still a steakhouse, plainly, but not everyone must eat it as one.
What the company actually sells
The flagship product is the prix-fixe Full Churrasco Experience, where the continuous cuts and Market Table arrive as one package. That fixed core makes the proposition easy to explain and gives groups fewer decisions to negotiate. Around it, Fogo has built a set of ways to visit without committing to the grand procession.
There is weekday lunch, weekend Brazilian brunch and a Market Table-only option. Bar Fogo offers all-day happy hour, shareable plates, a picanha burger, South American wine and caipirinhas. Private rooms catch birthdays, rehearsal dinners and corporate events. Catering, delivery and to-go orders carry parts of the menu outside the dining room. Gift cards convert celebration intent into prepaid demand.
Then come the check builders. Diners can add a dry-aged tomahawk, Wagyu New York strip, cocktails, wine or dessert. In 2025, Fogo introduced an Indulgent Churrasco Experience with choices such as a butter-bathed lobster tail or jumbo lump crab cake and dessert. The point was not to replace picanha. It was to give a familiar visit another ceiling.
Fogo Rewards added a frequency engine in April 2025. Developed with agency GALE, the program departed from the usual restaurant promise that enough spending will eventually produce a free item. Members could choose immediate benefits, including seafood starters and cut upgrades. The launch campaign turned the functional coaster gold and offered five winners free dining for a year. It was a neat piece of brand logic: the loyalty object was already sitting on every table.
The growth machine behind the grill
Fogo is privately held, and its ownership history reads like a short course in restaurant private equity. Thomas H. Lee Partners acquired it in 2012 in a reported $400 million deal. Fogo went public in 2015, then Rhône Capital took it private for about $560 million in 2018. Bain Capital bought the company in September 2023. The parties did not publish terms, but Reuters reported a value of roughly $1.1 billion including debt.
Global restaurant counts cited by company leadership at the Bain closing in 2023 and in the July 2026 CFO announcement. The bars show units, not revenue.
The attraction is legible. Fogo has shown that its format can work in city centers, suburbs, malls, freestanding buildings and mixed-use projects. Its development pitch targets U.S. footprints of roughly 5,000 to 8,000 square feet, generally seating 200 to 300 guests. Large rooms suit celebrations and business dinners, while multiple dayparts put expensive real estate to work before Saturday night.
Industry tracker Technomic estimated $651 million in 2024 U.S. system sales from 76 units. Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Fogo opened ten U.S. restaurants that year and planned another ten to twelve in 2025. By July 2026, the company described a network of 122 restaurants in 12 countries. In Britain, a 2024 partnership with Fazenda Rodizio Bar & Grill became a full conversion in May 2026, giving Fogo an established team and estate rather than a blank map.
Why a 1979 brand clicked with Gen Z
The surprise in Fogo’s recent run is not that people like steak. It is who has been especially enthusiastic. In the 2025 America’s Favorite Chains report from Nation’s Restaurant News and Technomic, Fogo ranked seventh overall and first among full-service brands for Gen Z. The finding came from a broader survey of 112,000 consumers.
A few qualities line up with younger dining habits. The meal is customizable without becoming solitary. It offers small discoveries instead of one enormous bet. It turns the table into a conversation: Which cut was that? Should we go green again? And it generates spectacle without installing a screen between the diner and the room. A server carving picanha from a skewer has always been shareable; now phones make that fact visible.
Fogo offers many cuts, guest-paced service and a fixed-price core instead of one ordered steak and separate sides.
Tableside carving and open-fire craft create an occasion, while lunch and Bar Fogo preserve lower-commitment visits.
Scale brings reservations, loyalty, catering, standardized training and a recognizable global brand.
The theater is also the production method. The flame and carving are not decorations added after the meal.
That mix places Fogo between polished casual dining and the special-occasion steakhouse. Ruth’s Chris and The Capital Grille compete for the celebratory check. Texas de Brazil, Chima and independent churrascarias compete on the format. Korean barbecue and hot pot compete for social, participatory energy. Fogo’s difference is that the guest participates by directing the flow, while trained staff still do the cooking and carving.
The challenge inside the opportunity
A choreography this labor-intensive can fray. The promise depends on cuts arriving hot, at the requested doneness, without either swarming or forgetting a table. A new restaurant needs more than recipes. It needs butchery, fire management, circulation and judgment. Rapid expansion raises the ordinary chain question in a sharper form: can a company standardize hospitality without making it feel standardized?
Fogo’s answer has been to treat culture as infrastructure. Selma Oliveira serves as chief culture officer, charged with keeping Brazilian culture central while recruiting talent for expansion. Chief Executive Barry McGowan, who became CEO in 2019 after six years as president, speaks about culture as the first building block of longevity. The company’s mission joins care for team members, guests and communities rather than treating service as a slogan aimed only outward.
Menu expansion creates another balancing act. Lobster, rewards, merchandise and bespoke campaign songs can widen the audience, but the reason to remember Fogo remains elemental: salt, flame, skewers, a knife and permission to ask for one more slice. The most durable additions are the ones that orbit that ritual instead of obscuring it.
That is where Fogo fits in the market now. It is an experiential restaurant company with steakhouse checks, casual-chain reach and a service ritual old enough to feel inherited. Its cleverest innovation is not technological. It is the reduction of a complicated human exchange to two colors. Green says the evening is still going. Red says not yet. Very few global businesses can explain themselves so completely on a coaster.