I try to write about Restaurant Week each season. This year I was away for the first week, but, thankfully, Winter 2012 Restaurant Week actually lasts 3 weeks. So you have one week left. Make your reservation! (Though it usually does get extended…)
This RW I decided that it would be a good idea to bring Mike to a steak house that I enjoyed very much, but not necessarily enough to want to bring him there for full price. In my mind, I would much rather get the same meal somewhere else since I’ve already tried Ruth’s Chris and put it very firmly in the center of the NYC Steakhouse pile. That’s not to say it’s not good, on the contrary… the buttered steak is something everyone should enjoy once in their life. But there is some stiff competition out there (cough cough Keen’s cough cough).
Mike and I decided to take advantage of our reservation, and order one meal off the Restaurant Week menu and one a la carte from the specials section on the menu.
The Restaurant Week menu is here.
We started with the Steakhouse salad with vinaigrette dressing. This was a very good, very fresh salad with great croutons.
Then we got the 8 ounce petite filet and paid the supplement to add grilled shrimp. The shrimp were very tasty and totally worth the up-charge (nothing worse than paying extra for shoddy shrimp!). The steak itself was good. It was charred well and full of flavor. But it wasn’t exactly super special. It was just good and well cooked.
This Restaurant Week menu also comes with a side. We chose creamed spinach. This was decent. I prefer the one from The Palm by far.
As for the a la carte special, you can choose a starter, steak, and get a dessert for about$50 (a veritable steal by NYC Steakhouse standard).
We started with the spinach and pear salad. This is my kind of salad. Sweet and filled with fruit. I know some people don’t like fruit in their green salad, but I’m a HUGE fan. And this didn’t disappoint.
The Cowboy Ribeye is usually their best steak, but we didn’t need such a huge piece of meat, so we got the regular Ribeye. This was very good, but surprisingly not as good as I remembered. It definitely had a leg up on the filete, but I remember the Ribeye having a lot more char (I’m such a char sucker). It was still quite delicious, however.
They had a brown sugar and walnut butternut squash side on the menu and I opted to get this instead of the sweet potato casserole that I got in the past and loved. this was good, but I missed that sweet potato casserole (which… let’s be honest… was really dessert).
The dessert with both menus was their signature chocolate cheesecake. I LOVED this, but Mike, who is a cheesecake aficionado, likes his cheesecake pure and original. Can’t please everyone!
Overall, this was a good Restaurant Week experience. The special menu is actually quite a deal on its own, but spending $35 for a steak dinner is really never a bad thing. I can’t say I LOVE this place… but it’s a good staple.
Total Nom Points: 6.5 out of 10
