News & Features Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Put a steak in it
From the sizzle of sirloin to the subtlety of tartare, the king of all meats offers something for everyone
BY DAVID VALDES GREENWOOD

I am the vegetarian’s nightmare: one who consumes meat not as a matter of unthinking behavior, but ritually and habitually, as a matter of choice and desire. The sizzle of a sirloin on a back-yard grill surpasses the scent of lilacs as the true start of summer for me; to my mind, a chef has demonstrated the apex of culinary control when he or she delivers a steak seared gorgeously brown on the outside, succulently pink and cooked only to the point of nominal safeness on the inside. If Whitman sang the body electric, I sing the body carnivorous and — O fortunate me! — Boston sings along.

If you love steak in all its incarnations, this city delivers the goods. From old-fashioned steak-house slabs to treatments Parisienne, with the occasional nod to Latin preparations, Boston offers plenty to sink your teeth into. You have your pick of neighborhood, price, and even degree of doneness — whether you like it bloody rare or cooked until scandalously black. ("Well done" is a savage injustice, I say. You might as well use the cow for shoes.)

There are exceptions, of course. This is not the best town for finding a Southwestern steak of distinction (none equals the caliber of those served at Texas’s Star Canyon, for instance), and you won’t find a restaurant truly obsessed with the perfect steak in the fashion of Brooklyn’s Peter Luger Steak House. But Beantown really does border on becoming Beeftown, its menus offering an excellent primer for self-education in the pleasures of beef.

East Coast Grill’s Chris Schlesinger — a chef who knows his way around a slice of meat — once wrote, "To be a professional cook in America is to work with a lot of beef, and to live in America is to eat a lot of beef." Some may argue with that last claim, but the former is fairly indisputable. In this country, we eat more beef than any type of poultry, and more than many seafood groups combined. And when many Americans think about beef, they instinctively think of the most basic, unadorned kind of steak: the grilled sirloin.

There’s something primal and satisfying about sirloin. The term encompasses a variety of cuts behind the tenderloin, and while the most commonly served top-sirloin cut (also less appetizingly called "butt steak") can often be chewier than higher-grade cuts, it nonetheless offers the beefiest possible flavor for its cost. The traditional preparation involves nothing more than a hot grill or cast-iron pan, augmented perhaps by salt and pepper. For a dish so simple, it’s surprisingly easy to screw up: cook it just a bit too long, and you’ve made yourself a jaw-numbing piece of work; cook it at the wrong temperature, and you lose both texture and color. Once you get the basic technique down — the right temperature for the right amount of time — you simply shouldn’t mess with it.

Frank’s Steakhouse (2310 Mass Ave, Cambridge, 617-661-0666) has followed that advice for 70 years. Stepping into Frank’s is as close to time travel as most of us will ever get; there, late-deco frosted glass meets a ’50s menu, ’70s booths, and timeless waitresses who call you "hon." Frank’s sirloin is straightforward in both presentation and price. Cooked however you like it (no purists here; the chefs will make it leather if you really wish), the 14-ounce New York Sizzler arrives in an individual skillet, accompanied largely by its own juices and your choice of starch: mashed, fries, rice — you know the drill. And there’s more: along with your steak and side, you also get a mini-loaf of bread (the kind of thing I imagine coming out of an Easy Bake oven), plus your choice of soup or salad, all for the low, low price of $14.95. Now that’s what I call an honest meal.

Of course, low price alone wouldn’t be a thrill if the steak were terrible. My inner snob is always ready to assume that any bargain will taste like one (the food equivalent of the fire-damaged refuse that turns up at Building 19). But Frank’s gets a decent sirloin and applies decades of practice to ensure respectable beefy goodness every time. The steak’s reliability and complete lack of pretension are a winning combination: the booths fill up early in the evening with white-haired patrons (who I’d bet also came here as youngsters), and on weekends the place stays jumping with locals of all ages till the kitchen closes. It may not be the place to come for the subtlety of an expensive cut of meat or the richness of a wine sauce, but for a taste of steak in the classic American vernacular, it can’t be beat.

Should your accent lean toward the French, that kind of sirloin might, I suppose, strike you as unspectacular. The French love affair with beef predates our own, which arose from 19th-century cattle drives out of Texas. They recorded their passion as early as the 13th century, when they adapted the Norse word steikjo — "spit-roasted" — thus creating the word that crosses our lips today. Any of those early, primitive images of skewered beast have long since been forgotten, erased by 300 years of sophisticated presentations — haute or casual — like the popular steak au poivre, with its crushed-pepper coating and red-wine demi-glace.

For me, the ultimate Francophile delight is steak frites, which generally means a steak with herbed butter and a side of thin, crispy fries. Perhaps I like the dish so much because it’s a more tasteful (and tasty) invocation of a remembered childhood thrill: dinner at Bonanza, a cafeteria-style steak-house chain, where a meal as cheap as a movie ticket nonetheless qualified as a celebration restaurant for a poor rural family. The steaks were chewy and the fries were enormous, wet paddles of starch — but I loved them.

No surprise, then, that I am addicted to their more flavorful and urbane counterparts. Boston is awash in restaurants referring to themselves as bistros, and it boasts several self-proclaimed brasseries (which would be working-class wonders in Paris but come out upscale here), and nearly all of these offer a variant on steak frites. Brasserie Jo aims for brasserie hubbub, but its frites are fairly unpersuasive, while Aquitaine gets the dish right but serves it in a charmless shotgun of a room. Fortunately, the newly renovated Truc (560 Tremont Street, Boston, 617-338-8070), under the confident hand of chef Philip Wang (who worked in the kitchen of no lesser a chef than Daniel Boulud), offers a lovely combination: a setting that reflects good taste and food that tastes good.

Despite unfortunate brown-paper tablecloths, no one will confuse Truc with a neighborhood café for the masses. With its robin’s-egg-blue walls and postmodern prints, topped by a painted, pressed-tin ceiling, the small room radiates a combination of serenity and welcome that should put you in good spirits even before your frites ($24) arrive. Typical of many French restaurants, Truc uses a hanger steak, which is a little less intensely beef-flavored but more tender than top sirloin (especially when sliced fairly thin). In a common variant, its herbed butter is whipped with blue cheese, which adds a tangy counterpoint to the earthiness of the steak itself. The frites are just as they should be: golden, crispy, not soggy in the least, even as you remain aware of the oil they were cooked in. Ask for your meat cooked medium rare (or rarer), and the juices of the pliant steak will become the ideal dipping sauce for the frites.

The tenderness of the meat itself is one of the joys of steak frites, a trait the dish shares with its Italian cousin, Tuscan-style steak. Bistecca alla Fiorentina involves drizzling a steak with olive oil and then grilling it very quickly, so that the inside is nearly rare (and thus most tender). The beef flavor is balanced by a finishing squeeze of lemon juice, resulting in the steak equivalent of a Renaissance fresco: an earthy subject rendered brightly.

Rialto, in the Charles Hotel (Harvard Square, Cambridge, 617-661 5050), has made Tuscan-style steak one of its signatures. You can enjoy it in half portion ($14) at the bar or spring for the mother lode in a mammoth entrée portion ($36). (I’ve had both, though I must confess that it borders on immoral to finish the entrée by yourself.) The plate-size cut of meat is appropriately charred in spots, just enough to offer testimony of grilling, and there is a pleasant nuttiness to its flavor, suggestive of the olive oil used and the shaved parmesan adorning the steak. The dish comes with arugula salad, and, oddly, three tiny red potatoes that look forlorn, as if they wandered onto this plate by accident and now miss their peers.

While Europeans dress steak with simple butter or oil, Latin carnivores tend to throw themselves into the preparation with decidedly more gusto, rubbing the meat with spices or bathing it in a piquant marinade. The traditional Cuban pre-grilling marinade is adobo, which blends garlic, salt, cumin, oregano, and sour orange or lime. This noble marinade has cousins throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, but it is so enshrined in Cuban culture as to have its own verb: adobar. Growing up, I spent summers in Miami’s Little Havana with my exiled relatives, and adobo was simply the scent of a kitchen to me.

But Miami has changed, adapting a more diverse, pan-Latin ethos, and its palate reflects this. These days, chimichurri — an Argentine sauce beloved by Nicaraguans as well — is as mighty as adobo. Oil infused with parsley, garlic, and lemon, chimichurri might not seem the ideal counterpart to adobe — cumin sends the dish east, while the parsley heads west — but the combination has surprising resonance. You can try chef Paul O’Connell’s rendition ($29.95) at Chez Henri (1 Shepherd Street, Cambridge, 617-354-8980), which — as a Cuban-French bistro — has some experience at juggling multicultural taste sensations. The steak is marinated in adobo sauce, so that it comes out with a slightly caramelized crust; then, in a nifty bit of deconstruction, the chimichurri liquids run like a river beneath it, but with the drenched parsley chopped atop the meat (perhaps in a nod to the herbed butter of steak frites). This preparation allows you, the diner, to decide just how influential you want the parsley to be: you may brush much of it aside for a more adobo-focused experience, or let the entire hemisphere cast its spell on your tongue at once.

After a bite that busy, you might find yourself longing for something slightly less fusion-oriented, which doesn’t necessarily mean more conservative. For purists and risk-takers alike, steak tartare is a glistening jewel of presentation. Named for a fierce Central Asian tribe of the 1200s (for reasons you can imagine but probably shouldn’t dwell on), tartare is raw steak, chopped with seasoned capers, onions, and raw egg. In the anxious 2000s, little distractions like mad-cow disease and salmonella will ensure you won’t be seeing tartare in mall food courts soon, but locals wanting a nibble on the wild side need look no further than Metro (1815 Mass Ave, Cambridge, 617-354-3727).

A star-crossed brasserie that lost both chef and pastry chef in its first year, Metro nonetheless features a dream menu for those who love eating past risk: raw-shellfish towers, marrow served still in the bone, and its silky tartare ($9.95), available on both bar and dinner menus. At Metro, harissa (chili paste) and mustard are chopped into tenderloin, along with the capers and egg. The rosy mound is served with traditional French bread and cornichons, but even without accompaniment, it is lovely: as it glides on the tongue, the egg smoothes the punch of the caper to yield a certain richness. It’s a distinct flavor, yet its intensity comes across as fairly subtle; on the steak spectrum, Frank’s sizzler roars at one end, and Metro’s tartare whispers on the other.

With such variety awaiting meat-eaters at every turn, you’ll understand if I feel almost sorrowful contemplating the beef-empty dining lives of my many vegetarian friends. I’m sure they’re quite content, and I know spectacular things may be done with exotica like broccoli rabe and Japanese eggplant, but I’m inclined to side with Julia Child, who wrote, "There’s nothing so satisfying as a perfect steak."

Four or five times a year, David Valdes Greenwood makes a pilgrimage from Boston to New York’s Balthazar for steak frites, and he always returns a very happy man. He can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net

Issue Date: October 17 - October 24, 2002
Back to the News & Features table of contents.
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group