The restaurant was exactly what I was looking for, yet another great OpenTable.com pick. Wil and I were in New York City, the night before our first AUPN Aperture Road Tour date. We'd finished packing in the morning, loaded all the gear into the truck, gotten it all brought to our rooms (that requires some hefty tipping) and he hit the shower while I went to look for candies or something to put in to the gift bags for the 75 people schedule to attend our class.
I wanted to find a nice place to eat, to thank him for all his hard work. The original plan was to also include one of our instructors, Brett, who flew across the country to pick up the class system so he could use it in the coming weeks, but he was grounded at Dulles, the result of bad weather.
So we went to BLT Steak (BLT stands for Bistro Laurent Tourondel), an upscale steak joint on 57th street with magical specials and an impeccable wine list. (They also have Hendricks gin, which I think makes the perfect gin and tonic.)
The specials seemed tempting, and while I would normally have gone for the seven-pepercorn crusted strip steak with a tomato citrus relish, my eyes instead alighted upon the Kobe beef. For a moment I was tempted to order the actual Kobe, the Japanese variety that's head-and-shoulders about US breeds, but a $26 an ounce, I wasn't quite up for it. Instead I opted for 10-ounces of some of the most incredibly perfect Top Cap steak ever. Probably overdoing it, I also ordered the grilled octopus salad which featured a set of grilled octopus tentacles that were illegally-good. Like a small crime had been committed in my mouth.
We were pursuing the menu when the Wil asked about the Portherhouse for Two that was on the menu, 40 ounces of beef designed to be shared by a couple (or a small Colombian family). "Do you have a porterhouse that's just for one?" he asked.
"Well," joked the waitress, "if you can finish it, I suppose it's for one." She had done it, thrown down the gantlet. It was on.
Before anything is served though we get an amuse/appertiser, which was an incredible tourine of duck liver paté followed by the most delicious popovers I have ever had.
Let me digress here, a romantic time-travel aside while I mention that the popovers served at one of the fancy restaurants my grandfather took me to in Florida when I was in grade school often served popovers. I fell instantly in love with them and to this day they still signify comfort and a first understanding of what it was like to fall in love with food.
Anyhow, when the massive (it's like the size of my thigh) steak comes it's accompanied by two sides, hasbrowns and onion rings (essentially a massive pile of onion rings shaped like the old toy for infants where circular rings are piled up around a wooden dowel).
The Kobe beef was beyond descriptoin, and the excessiveness of the meal was surpassed only by the sheer prettyness of most of the people in the room. Out of habit of years of giving the comfy wall bench seat to my wife I made the mistake of letting him take the view of the room, leaving me to pivot around in my seat on occasion and gawk, less subtly with each sip my my Syrah-Grenache.
During our meal a pair of men and a woman who turned out to be the Czech born wife of one of the guys, began to talk to us about the best steak places. The closest man, who looked like a cross between someone in the Sopranos and someone at a jewish family reunion mentioned that he used to go to Peter Luger's when he was a teen, and eat steak there four nights a week, so Wil's display of bravado did not phase him.
After we finished our meal, they got theirs, and I asked what the man was having. "Veal," he replied. "I cant' do steak any more, I"ve had two heart attacks."
"I wish you'd mentioned that before" said Wil, obviously having missed my requests that he perish from this earth after aiding me in my presentation classroom setup.
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