Before I headed to the closing film in the NY film festival last night where I saw Pan Labrinyth, I ate an early dinner at Quality Meats. QM as I will call it is located on 58th street between 5th and 6th avenue and is a steakhouse (created actually by Smith and Wollensky) with a modern touch. Or a "radical reinterpetation of the stodgy old idea" by the youngest son of the Wollensky people. A white-plaster cow’s head is affixed to the entrance wall, and the bar is lined with decorative jars of bourbon mash. The walls and ceilings are covered with planks of polished brown walnut (“an homage to a traditional meat locker,”) and as you sit down to your meal, one of the first things you notice is that portions of the room are lit with industrial-style chandeliers fashioned from giant steel meat hooks.
I have only been to two "real" steakhouses in my life. I have never been to a Smith&Wollensky or any of it's siblings or offsprings for that matter. I have been to CraftSteak in the Meatpacking district in Manhattan and AIX (the Alain Ducasse venture in Vegas) both of which were excellent but not the old stodgy idea of a steak house either. I am actually not a huge steak eater or a lover of restaurants packed with people in boring grey suits but somehow Quality Meats sounded fun and tempting. And it was actualy really good, if done correctly. I say correctly because if you ordered an appetizer, a steak, sides, and a dessert, they should just have the ambulance waiting outside because your triple bypass surgery is going to be needed nearly instantly. Going with someone who has been to a steakhouse was needed, I guess, since he ordered (for both of us) correctly. One caesar salad that left us questioning when it arrived if it was just one, one Aged Ribeye steak, some spinach, and then a warm blueberry peach cobbler. I questioned if it was going to be enough but it turns out that I couldn't handle another bite. It was all exceptional. The "new side classics" like corned creme brulee and buttered edamame with mint salt sounded tempting but we chose spinach, a classic. Supposedly we chose correctly since the corn creme brulee looked horrifying.
You enter the restaurant through an aged wooden door and you descend into the restaurant passing a white ceramic cows head which is attached to the white ceramic tiled wall. There is an incredible industrial feeling reminiscient of a butcher shop but also a sense of the traditional meat lockers since walnut planks make up stairs and walls at times. There are chandeliers made of pulleys and large steel butcher hooks. A vintage market scale has been reimagined as a lighting sculpture. Pretty cool, and grisly, I thought.
NYMag: Like most serious carnivores, the steak man is a pragmatist who’s willing to suffer almost any indignity for a good piece of meat. “They’re making some concessions to people who are not true steak aficionados,” he observed between diplomatic spoonfuls of corn chowder. “This is admirable, as long as they don’t muck up the main course.” Before you get to the main course at Quality Meats, however, you must negotiate helpings of generic, vaguely rubberized tuna tartare, acceptable though extravagantly priced crab cakes ($16 for a single one), and a nice gnocchi appetizer fiendishly designed to taste like macaroni and cheese.
There’s plenty of steak to be had at Quality Meats once you’ve waded through all this ephemera, although it doesn’t come cheap. I enjoyed my neighbor’s bizarre flatiron-and-blackberry combination ($27) much more than my own bone-in sirloin, which lacked the charred crunchiness of a great steak and cost $42 for a meager eighteen ounces. The steak man attacked his bone-in rib steak (24 ounces for $44) with commendable gusto, but if you want to enjoy the full flavor of this great fresser’s specialty, order the 64-ounce double cut, a huge, Rabelaisian haunch of beef, carved tableside in thick dinosaur slices for two. The similarly sized rack of lamb tasted curiously bland to me, although there are good lamb chops on the menu, covered in a nice mint sauce dotted, weirdly, with a few too many Mission figs. In a city teeming with mediocre veal chops, the one at Quality Meats is among the best I’ve tasted, but the best dish of all was the suckling pig, cooked to a kind of melting, crackly crispness and mingled, ribs and all, with a savory apricot sauce.
Beautiful banner my friend!
Posted by: Alan | October 17, 2006 at 09:11 PM