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| - Sorry, but this is clearly "old people food" -- everything poorly seasoned and half-assed. I made the observation that bad steakhouses always have bad knives too, which makes it just more apparent that a restaurant selling a $20 steak has access to lower-quality beef than your average consumer as you sit there trying to buzz saw your way through the gristly bits. I'm certainly my strip wasn't USDA choice (let alone "prime," places will put that in the name to give people who know what it means a good laugh) because I've never struggled more to work my through a New York strip.
I had the special consisting of a NY strip (and trust me, "old" NY strip doesn't automatically turn tough and miserable, it gets better--this was just bad quality meat) with peppercorn sauce, shrimp, and two sides. The steak itself had no discernible seasoning layer and had anemic grill marks. I could do better on a teflon pan, some kosher salt, and a pepper grinder.
The peppercorn sauce had zero flavor, just a fatty insipid liquid, and no visible cracked or whole peppercorns. Trust, peppercorns are delicious, they soften up, and absolutely belong in a peppercorn sauce. Clearly they had blessed the sauce with a few shakes from a disposable peppershaker but the sauce tasted like failure and missed opportunity. They recommended sauteed spinach which I can eat all day. I'm eating some right now that took me 3 minutes to make using the same pan as the $4 sirloin I picked up at the grocery store, which is killing that NY strip I had.
No hint of seasoning, no garlic chunks, just some watery spinach that had been clearly sitting in a steam table. Seriously, sauteed spinach is a great thing and the idea is that you sautee it to order, and it takes all of 3 minutes, and if you're not serving it to grandma, you load it up with sauteed garlic and salt and pepper, you make that spinach pop, it is delicious. Not here.
All said and done, I suspect everything on the menu should come down by 1/3 in price and drop "prime" from the name. On par with Lone Star, Bonanza, Sizzler, etc. Why don't these places know you can make amazing steaks with a hot cast iron or stainless pan? They always manage to completely botch a good seasoned layer of steaky goodness.
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