Things do go ’round. Thirty years ago, steak was the working family’s night out. The price of grain and beef rose, people stopped eating “red meat,” and the lower-priced steakhouses like Valle’s went out of business. With the 1990s reaction to all that, steak came back, along with martinis and cigars, but the steakhouses of the last decade were upscale. Now the beef cycle is just picking up again, and even middle-class steakhouses have a chance. But local restaurateurs have not rushed to revive the Colorado Public Library, the Rib Room at the Sonesta, or the Newbury Steak House. The John Birch Society is back, but not Buddy’s Sirloin Pit, where, right in Harvard Square back in the radical ’70s, you could get Birch literature along with a $4.75 sirloin and a lime rickey.
Instead, we have Boston’s very first LongHorn Steakhouse, right next to the new Fenway Theatre, and primed, as it were, for Manny-mad Fenway Park crowds all summer. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it’s one of 138 or so other locations, almost all located in Southern and Midwestern states. Despite the Texas décor, the original LongHorn opened in Atlanta, in 1981. And, of course, no longhorn meat is served. Remember what happened to longhorn cattle in the movie Hud? Similar to what happened to all those British dogies over the past two months.
Despite layers of phoniness and weird corporate concessions to the upscale counterculture (e.g. “LongHorn Salmon”), some signature items at our LongHorn Steakhouse are good eating. I especially recommend some of the sauces: if you order the chicken tenders ($4.99 appetizer/ $9.99 dinner) for a child, you will enjoy eating the remainder yourself, mainly because of the nicely made honey-mustard sauce. The “Texas Tonion” ($5.99) is likewise saved by a horseradish dipping sauce. The “petals” of this onion, however, are loose, dry-fried, and only a little sweet.
I also think you will enjoy the Texas T-Bone ($17.49), which came rare to order on both sides — a bit of a trick, since the fillet side cooks at a different rate than the sirloin side. The sirloin side really shines on flavor, which argues for the “New York Strip” ($16.99), although the tenderness of the fillet side will send some to “Flo’s Fillet” (seven-ounce, $15.49/ nine-ounce, $16.99). Your side dishes of choice are the baked sweet potato, punched up like an Idaho, or the pleasantly under-sautéed vegetable medley. The chop steak ($9.99) is a fine burger, but smothered with onions and mushrooms so oversalted you won’t be able to eat ketchup if you taste even a few.
You can even survive the “Fried Cheese Cake,” which is cubes of the stuff in a soup of strawberry sauce and whipped cream. The cubes melt into a creamy white cheese that is pleasantly sweet and doesn’t seem as rich as the conventional cheesecake, although it probably is. And the decaf is good.
Now, the dodge list: 1) You can eat the hot bread with the steak knife stuck in it, but don’t complain to me; you’ve been warned that it is foamy white stuff turned brown in some kind of way. 2) Prairie peppers ($5.79) are those genetically selected jalapeños without bite — meaning they have no flavor — stuffed with more of that melty white creamy cheese before being fried into rather heavy croquettes. 3) Grilled shrimp ($6.99) are tantalizingly close, as ours were tender and not overgrilled, but, uh-oh, so overpeppered you can’t taste a thing. In fact so overpeppered you can’t hear or see very well either. 4) “Authentic Texas Chili” ($2.49/3.49) reminded us never to order anything “authentic” in a chain restaurant, and for the same reason you should never order anything famous in a brand-new restaurant. My read is that they think authentic is “without beans,” but with extra-sweet green bell-pepper and tomato slices, and rather little cumin or any other chili spice. Heat comes from a few jalapeño slices (real ones this time), scattered on top of a whole Waldorf salad of shredded red onion and orange cheese. 5) The Caesar salad ($1.99, included with steaks) was tired, and so was the 6) mixed green salad ($1.99, included with steaks). Well, at least we’re ready for the main course: 7) Dodge also the rib-eye steak (12-ounce, $14.99/16-ounce, $16.99) — a surprise, since this steak usually combines flavor and tenderness better than any other choice. Ours was toughish and not much on taste either. That the server is trained to brag that “none of our steaks is ever frozen” should lower expectations, but not this much. 8) Side dishes of “Double-Jack Beans” are served in tiny cups the way fish restaurants used to serve cole slaw. 9) French fries, which no one here claims were never frozen, ought to have taste as well as texture. 10) The barbecue-chicken sandwich (lunch only, $6.79) had handsome grill marks, but tasted branded. It was underdone and a little fatty, and the smoke was all in the sauce.
Dessert dodge-’ems: 11) “Old Fashioned Apple Cobbler” ($3.99) was another case where the server didn’t emphasize the unfrozen part, but the Granny Smith apple slices tasted frozen, the crisp topping wasn’t crisp, the cherry sauce (?) was weird, and the vanilla-bean ice cream didn’t taste much like vanilla. 12) The “Hot Fudge Brownie Deluxe” ($3.99) will actually be popular with some diners for its sheer size, especially the pie-shaped wedge of rather spongy nut brownie. I’m just holding out for a dessert like this with concentrated chocolate flavor, and still holding out.
LongHorn Steakhouse has an overly mainstream all-California wine list — two white zinfandels, for example, and none of the red wine from that grape. The beer list is also timid, but workable, although I cannot recommend the tap, after my draft of Samuel Adams Summer Ale. The “Texas Margarita” is actually quite good — reasonably sour and served with plenty of salt.
Atmosphere at the LongHorn is hard to rank. It’s a fake Texas roadhouse, and maybe people start whooping after a few longnecks or a Red Sox win. On my visit, people talked loudly enough to drown out the country music. We hit some service pauses — including a round of appetizers slow enough to get us an unsolicited apology — and on one visit we drew a booth with a clear sight line to the tray station where they scrape the plates. Everyone knows the wheeze about not wanting to see how sausage is made. Well, you don’t want to be looking at where the leftover meat goes, either. Then again, that is more like an authentic Texas roadhouse.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.
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