Steaks

Steak is the Cadillac of entrees. Many kinds of restaurants serve it, and it isn’t always expense-account plush (consider cube steak, chicken-fried steak, and Philly steak); but passionate steak-eaters look for ultimate carnivorous satisfaction in a steak house, where luxury reigns yet frills are few, where dinner is a ritual with clarity of purpose, and where the price of a meal is stratospheric. There’s a reason steak-house meals cost so much: An exemplary steak house procures prime cuts that ordinary consumers never see in the supermarket. It cooks them at temperatures home grills do not attain. And it serves all the good and proper companions, which can include (but are not limited to) crystalline martinis and cool seafood cocktails to start, crunch-crusted heaps of hash brown potatoes to push through puddles of steak juice, and blocks of cheesecake white as alabaster for dessert.