Texas de Brazil Quietly Became a Churrasco Empire

The all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse you have driven past a hundred times started in Addison in 1998 and quietly became a 60-plus location empire. Here is how to actually win the rodizio. Most people file Texas de Brazil under “chain steakhouse” and keep driving. That is a mistake. The churrasco giant with rooms from Aruba to Las Vegas was born right here in DFW, and the original idea has barely changed since the first dining room opened in Addison in 1998. Founders Salim Asrawi and Salah Izzedin built it after recruiting a real gaucho, Evandro Caregnato, out of southern Brazil in 1997 to keep the cooking honest. The company is still headquartered in Dallas. So when you sit down at the Cedar Springs location along the Katy Trail, you are eating at something close to the source, not a franchise copy of an idea from somewhere else. The format is rodizio, and that is the part people get wrong. Played right, dinner here is one of the better value runs in DFW dining. Played wrong, you fill up on cheese bread and tap out before the picanha ever reaches your plate.

Where It Actually Started

Texas de Brazil opened its first room in Addison in 1998, with a Dallas location following a year later. By 2002 it had crossed into international territory with an outpost in Aruba, and it has since grown past 60 restaurants across Texas, Florida, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado and beyond. For a concept that reads as fully imported, the corporate roots are pure North Dallas. The throughline is Caregnato, the longtime culinary director who grew up with churrasco in Rio Grande do Sul, where ranch cooks slow-roasted big cuts over open fire and carved them straight off the skewer. That tradition is the entire pitch here: flame-grilled meat, hand-carved at the table, no printed menu required. You can read the backstory and pull up every location on the official Texas de Brazil site.

How the Rodizio Works

Here is the system. You get a small disk at your seat, green on one side, red on the other. Green up means the gaucho chefs keep coming with skewers of flame-grilled beef, lamb, pork, chicken and Brazilian sausage, slicing directly onto your plate. Flip it to red when you need a breather. Flip it back to green when you are ready to go again. That is the trap and the gift in one. There is no portion limit, so pacing is the whole game. The smart approach is to treat the first couple of rounds as reconnaissance, figure out what is strong that night, then spend your real estate on the two or three cuts actually worth it.

What to Hit, What to Skip

Target the picanha first. It is the top sirloin cap, the signature cut, and the thing the entire tradition is built around. The flank, the garlic-marinated sirloin and the Brazilian sausage are all reliable, and the lamb chops are worth a card flip when they roll by hot off the fire. The salad and seasonal area is large and genuinely good, stocked with charcuterie, imported cheeses, vegetables and Brazilian specialties. It is also the single biggest threat to your dinner. Same goes for the table-side Brazilian cheese bread (pão de queijo) and garlic mashed potatoes that arrive unprompted. They are excellent. They are also engineered to fill you up before the good skewers come around, so graze, do not commit.