Janna started her meal off with a beefsteak tomato and buffalo mozzarella salad. The beefsteak tomatoes were perfectly seasoned and who can resist the creamy texture of buffalo mozzarella? It was a great salad, perfectly prepared and presented. I started off with a soft shelled crab which was lightly fried and absolutely wonderful and sweet. You have no idea how excited I was about this soft shelled crab, I can't find them at any of the grocery stores in town and none of the restaurants serves them. For me, this was a rare treat indeed.
But of course, we're at the Chicago Chop House for steak not salads and crabs. Janna and I decided to split the 64oz porterhouse, cooked medium rare. Here's where our evening started going downhill. The meat was perfectly succulent and clearly of the highest quality, so there's no doubt in our minds that the Chicago Chop House can serve a good steak. The problem is that they served us a steak that was medium to medium well, not medium rare. You know, it's one thing for a backyard barbeque cook to screw up a steak, it's another thing when your entire establishment is centered around cooking steaks. To mess up a steak like this is completely and totally unacceptable, especially so when you're allegedly the best steakhouse in the city of Chicago. The over cooking of this steak sucked the life out of it and destroyed its wonderful flavor. Instead of being a robust red, full of flavor, our steak was a sad grey with a touch of pink. The Filet portion of the steak was actually cooked better than the strip portion, how they pulled that off is beyond me. In any event, neither one of them were cooked a proper medium rare.
I do not recommend the Chicago Chop House because of their complete and utter failure to properly cook a steak. The salad was good, the soft shelled crab was terrific, Russ' American Fries were great with the steak. But when you're a steakhouse, when your business is steak, it is unacceptable to overcook it. Out of 5 possible stars, the Chicago Chop House gets only two stars. It's unfortunate because the quality of the steak is good enough to earn 5 stars, the incompetence of the kitchen staff costs them three stars and our endorsement.
5 comments:
Wait - the Chop House serves Russ' American Fries?
At least you owned up to writing this one.
I frankly think that it is ridiculous that some restaurants can't get the simplest instructions right. I bet it's because the cooks' parents parents didn't straighten them out when they were babies.
I believe the Russ in question is different from the Russ in West Michigan.
I did write this post, but not the last. Janna writes the desert posts, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
I'll blame incompetance before attachment parenting on this one. AP didn't exist when those cooks were children.
I'd have sent it back. Overcooking a steak that much is absurd. A good cook will err on the side of undercooking it, so if the customer doesn't like it they can simply cook it some more instead of wasting a steak.
Anony - That was most definitely Janna on deserts. I know her style well enough to confirm that. You really should leave a name, we don't bite. Well, Steve does, but the rest of us don't. :)
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