The Defector Interns Say Fogo de “Ciao”
Sarah: All summer long, we’ve been saying “Thank god there are two of us,” whether we’re hyping each other up to send jokes in Slack or encouraging each other to ask members of the staff to chat. But this may have been the toughest challenge we faced together.
Sohini: You never know where you might go when Jasper Wang asks “Do you have dinner plans?” an hour into the intern farewell drinks at a bar called House of Wax, which is located inside an Alamo Drafthouse located inside a mall in Downtown Brooklyn.
Sarah: For all my Philly heads, the House of Wax is like if they turned the Mütter Museum into a bar. It was an unexpected turn in a day mostly spent feigning productivity while we worked on our true mission: getting Sabs to buy us a cheesecake (which we promptly devoured in the office with Lauren’s help).
Sohini: So there we were at HOW (House of Wax), listening to Roth hold court, and Sabs intervenes with a story about how their Chinese wash-and-fold lady thinks they are … Puerto Rican. The laundry lady when she tries on Sabs’s clothes:
Sarah: And that’s when it happened. Perhaps if we had been better about checking the Slack, we would have known about the long-running Defector at Fogo de Chão bit. Perhaps we would have known where Jasper was going with his line of questioning. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I, too, will always commit to the bit. And as previously established, there was no way in hell I would be doing this alone.
Sohini: I had never been to Fogo de Chão before, meaning I learned everything I knew about the one-to-two pounds of Brazilian meat I was about to eat the hour before I devoured it. We laughed and laughed at Roth inquiring whether his pescatarian wife would be down for them to join us. (She left him on read for a bit, and her silence was deafening.) All that time, we should have gone to Fogo and put our names down, because the restaurant—which was empty when we passed by it on our way to the bar—now had a 30-minute wait. Samer speculated that we got heat-checked. “You think you can just show up to Fogo de Chão on any random weeknight in August and get seated right away? Who do you think you are, Defector’s sixth-ever editorial intern?”
Sarah: I’m actually not sure. I might be seventh. We should probably compare times that we replied to our emails from Tom to figure out where we rank. I took a while to respond, because he failed to specify that he was Tom Ley from Defector, so how was I supposed to know? You can’t be too cautious.
Sohini: We passed the time waiting for our table to be ready at the mall’s McNally Jackson. Just as I was wondering if it would be weird to buy a book by Edmund White at an outing with my coworkers, I spotted a familiar face:
I should have invited him to dine with us in the hopes that he would write an article about it afterward: Sohini Desai Ate Fogo de Chão The Right Way.
Sarah: JUMP SCARE! Why is Ezra Klein looking into my eyes as if he’s about to tell me that the real war crime is not engaging in dialogue? But anyway, after escaping that harrowing obstacle (I’m proud of you by the way), we sat down for our final challenge. Our last supper, if you will. Except everyone in there looked like they were vacationing in Miami.
Sohini: I honestly could not tell you anything specific about the meat we ate, besides that there was so, so much of it. Steak, chicken, lamb, steak wrapped in bacon, chicken wrapped in bacon. They bring it over to you on skewers. For the steak, they slice your desired cut onto your plate with a giant knife, and you grab it with little tongs. If you say no to any of it, the waiter will pout at you and go, “So you don’t want my meat? :(.” This is only barely an exaggeration.
Sarah: I could tell you about the unlimited salad bar, though. Call me Brutus with how crazy I went on that Caesar. That was probably where I should have stopped, but that man really wanted to give me his meat. I unfortunately found out that eating copious amounts of meat, drinking a bunch of alcohol, and then sleeping on a hard floor to get on a bus the next day was not the best idea I’ve ever had.
Sohini: The meat was a little salty, but mostly from the tears everyone cried at our impending departure. It was an awesome summer, and I’m so glad I got to do it with you, Sarah. Your security theater blog proves relevant literally every single week, meaning I am thinking about it every single week. And I believe your sensibility and talent were best captured by your blog on the new Buffalo Bills stadium. “Hochul has the charisma of a dentist and the political backbone of a jellyfish.” Lmao. It was perfect—funny and informative and incisive. And thanks to you, I now have a non-zero amount of knowledge about baseball! At least enough to worry about your son Jacob Misiorowski.
Sarah: I think one of the best parts about having two interns is that we both have very different backgrounds and were writing very different things, and that allowed us to learn a lot from each other. I could not stop laughing at your Spencer Pratt blog. Your humor so perfectly lifted up your points, which is something I tried to emulate through the summer. And my favorite blog of yours is definitely the Prairieland blog. In addition to being incredibly important, I thought the way you structured it was so effective, laying out the case in such a way that showed both the absurdity and danger of labeling the defendants as terrorists. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but you did so masterfully. My favorite sentence you’ve ever written, however, is “get Plato’s gay ass back on the syllabus.” I think about this probably once a day.
Anyway, back to Fogo. Here’s what those who journeyed there with us thought of the food:
Jasper Wang: I have been the one pushing the Defector NYC contingent to go eat at Fogo de Chão, mostly earnestly, because the salad bar lunch buffet is basically the same price as my regular Sweetgreen order. This week, I had to settle for dinner, which was not a particularly good deal but was a perfectly nice experience with coworkers. Hot tip: If any of the meat slicing servers get too pushy about their wares, tell them you suffer from gout and that particular meat is a gout trigger, and they will back off. (I actually have gout and lamb actually is bad for me, but I’m sure it would work for whatever meat they happen to be offering you.) Three stars.
Israel Daramola: I’ve learned from experience to not try to outmeat the meat restaurant, so I paced myself and tried to win by decision. But when I woke up the next morning, it certainly felt like I’d been knocked out by the various meats that I sampled. Shocking as this may be, I think RFK Jr. might be wrong about the health benefits of the carnivore diet. Two-and-a-half stars.
Lauren Theisen: I was very hungry when we finally sat down to dinner, and because the people serving the meat made me feel like I’d kicked their dog when I tried to politely refuse an option, I ended up eating what felt like 15 different kinds of meat in 45 minutes. My body still hasn’t forgiven me. Two stars.
Samer Kalaf: My one regret is going for the chicken thigh rather than holding out for more of the premium beef. I felt like I left some opportunities on the table, but I will use this as a teaching moment, which is ultimately what any farewell intern meal should incorporate. May they learn from my errors as they leave this blog village and venture out into the great unknown. Four stars.
David Roth: [Went home to be a family man. Zero stars.]
Sohini: I honestly think that this was one of the best summers of my life, and getting to write blogs at Defector for 10 weeks was no small part of that. These guys simply rock. I got to hit not one but TWO RBI in the media softball league, thank you Coach Samer. And I got to work with Brandy, which was kind of unbelievable given that Ask A Fuck Up was in the room with me and my friends during so many genuinely significant life decisions. It was clear how much everyone enjoys each other on the very first day of our internship, and right away you just have the desire to be a part of that as much as you can.
So: a solid meal with some of the people who made this summer such a meaningful one? Five out of five stars.
Sarah: This has been such an amazing summer, and this internship has been filled with so many wonderful moments, like becoming the parent of a professional pitcher, accidentally becoming a patron of Phillyfector, and witnessing Brandy and Sabs deliver the greatest karaoke performance of all time. The absolute best moment was probably in the first week, when I got perhaps the greatest email ever written. It began, “scrw you and garble literature migrating what human people do.” Two months later, I still don’t know what this means, but my friend is currently embroidering it onto a pillow.
This internship made me love writing in ways I haven’t in years, and all of the support from the Defector staff has meant the world to me. I’ll miss sending a few quick thoughts to Lauren that ends up being a whole paragraph of rambling, commiserating about the Mets with Roth, monkeying around with you and Sabs, or Luis’s commentary on the weather in the Philly slack channel. We may have faced death in that mall, but doing it with this group is like a million stars. So all in all, it balances out. Five out of five stars.
