Restaurant of the Month: Fogo de Chao.
The name's changed. The room hasn't bothered to notice: same two floors near Liverpool Street, the ground-floor bar still pouring a pre-dinner cocktail before you're walked up to dark wood, low light, and leather booths that have clearly seen a lot of celebratory birthdays.
Honestly, nothing's different beyond the sign outside. Same format, same reason to book, and if you knew this place as Fazenda, nobody's asking you to fall in love twice, just to clock the new logo on the way in.
This visit went differently to how it would have under the old name: bolinhos de bacalhau to start, a seafood platter alongside, then the full churrasco with wagyu empanadas for company. Two Malbecs went up against all of it, both ordered on this trip: a Colomé Auténtico first, then the Domingo Molina Mortero.
The bolinhos de bacalhau remain the smartest order on the starters list, cod, potato, and lemon, gone in two bites, ordered specifically so there's something to do with your hands before the meat shows up. The seafood platter earns its place too: properly succulent and juicy, not the polite time-filler a shared starter can sometimes be while everyone pretends they're not just waiting for the passadors.
The churrasco is still the entire reason anyone books a table here, rebrand or no rebrand. Ask for the picanha first, straight off the skewer, before anything else gets a look in; it's the cut this whole format exists to serve, and the one worth saving your appetite for. The rotation keeps rolling on well after it, lamb, sausage, tenderloin, all doing their laps with the same roasted pineapple and cinnamon in tow, which by now feels less like a garnish and more like a house rule. The wagyu empanadas, meanwhile, are a pass on the return visit: perfectly fine, entirely skippable, the kind of thing you order once out of curiosity and then quietly let go of in favour of a second helping of picanha.
It's a set-price format, worth knowing before you sit down: your bill doesn't move regardless of how much meat turns up or how many times the passador swings back round, which makes it considerably easier to enjoy the evening instead of doing maths at the table.
One reservation: the room's a decent size, and the trade-off is that smaller tables can get quietly forgotten once it fills up, since the meat service naturally gravitates toward the bigger groups first. Flag it early if the passadors seem to be giving you a wide berth rather than assuming they'll swing back eventually.
Would we go back? Yes, and mostly because of the manager on this visit, who was properly on it and headed off the table-size problem before it became one. Next time we'd flag a small table early rather than wait politely to see if the room remembers we're there.
Worth repeating: the first cut of picanha straight off the skewer, still smoking, before it's so much as touched a plate.
Reservations here: fogodechao.uk/location/london-bishopsgate