I’m the prototypical meat eater. How I love succulent steak and tangy tender ribs. And ever since Le Baton Rouge and The Keg have opened up shop in the area and brought back steak and ribs as popular fare, clones have been popping up as well to get their piece of the cake… or steak I should say.
A small chain of restaurants has opened in the last few years in the Montréal area and Houston is its name. They specialize in my favorite of man-fuel: Steak and Ribs. I went twice before reviewing. Once for steak and once for, you guessed it, ribs.
STEAK
So I come in for my first tasting and I have a New York cut in mind or maybe a Filet Mignon, depending on their preparation method. When it comes to steak, price is not an obstacle, if it’s a gustatory orgasm of course. The waitress convinced me though, to take the rib steak, said it was superbly delicious. She had a good pitch. So rib steak with fries it is (I didn’t feel like having a baked potato, more on that later).
So in comes my 24-ounce piece of rib steak (yeah, 24; never again, I don’t know how people can eat all that). It’s pink, with a little layer of warm blood mixed with a little broth. It looks good and it smells pretty good, too. One of the ends looks kind of tough and it is, to my chagrin, so I dig in to this part right away and leave the tender part for the end. Once I get to the tender part, it is so much better but pretty bland. I start looking at my cut of meat and there are no punctures, not even a little bit of garlic to enliven the taste. All the spices and flavorful herbs are all on the outside, nothing was added inside.
Now in theory, a restaurant table should never have salt or pepper on it because what you eat should be delicious and need no additives. Adding salt to rib steak is as heretical as asking for a bottle of ketchup at a French restaurant. But I had to sprinkle some salt on there to give it some taste. Now it was good — but far, far from great. It was like taking out the girl of your dreams and finding that she’s as dumb as a ton of bricks. It needed some spirit and it was dull.
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