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done with steak from restaurants

#121
Mike Whitfield said:
steak houses' burgers are often horrible because they grind up old steaks
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That might be why their chili is so good.
That's the story with Wendy's, they supposedly chop up old burgers to put in their chili & TBH it's the best damn chili I can think of, just had some today.
There were some large chunks of semi-patty-shaped burger in there, LOL!

I think that was the original function of chili anyway, a place to throw the leftovers & make them into a useable dish one last time.
Curry is a great dish to make with meat that's ready to "go off".
 
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#122
Killed_by_Death said:
That might be why their chili is so good.
That's the story with Wendy's, they supposedly chop up old burgers to put in their chili & TBH it's the best damn chili I can think of, just had some today.
There were some large chunks of semi-patty-shaped burger in there, LOL!

I think that was the original function of chili anyway, a place to throw the leftovers & make them into a useable dish one last time.
Curry is a great dish to make with meat that's ready to "go off".
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I love Wendy's chilli. It's absolutely chopped up burger and it's delicious. The beans are good. The sauce is good. Give me a large chili and a chocolate frosty and I'm a happy man.
 
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#123
Killed_by_Death said:
(...)The kicker is, I could have done the job on the steak at home, LOL!
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100%.

My pops taught me how to cook steak on a charcoal grill, and it worked well for the first part of my adulthood. I still do it that way on occasion.

Then I learned the beauty of the reverse-sear with cast iron + oven. Whew. YouTube is a beautiful thing. I had been making steak the same way for 15 years until I went down a YouTube rabbit hole one night. Cast iron, butter, and garlic? Can't go wrong.

Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing steak places out there, but it's often not worth the price when I can cook it the same way they do at a fraction of the cost. I know you pay for more than food cost at a restaurant, but the markup on steak is insane.
 
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#124
I never order steak or lobster in a restaurant. I do both better at home. I tend to order food that I don't make at home, or prepared differently. And if i like it, I'm likely to learn how to make it myself. We avoid chain restaurants as much as possible ... I have a long list of "never agains".

We're more likely to try foreign cuisines when dining out.
 
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#126
High end steakhouses, while pretty salty, are not overpriced imho.

It isn't about the piece of meat as much as it is about the ritual.

Drinking a Manhattan at the bar while waiting to be seated. A whole baseball team of staff to wait on you: one seats you, one brings water, one brings a platter of the finest fresh cuts to encourage salivation. Another takes your order and yet another brushes the crumbs from the table cloth before your dishes are served to you straight from the oven as soon as the Maytag Blue dressed wedge salad is consumed.

The platters of sautéed mushrooms and creamed spinach alongside baked potatoes so huge they are surely mutated. The bottle of bold red that smoothly washes down the tender, aged beef.

The relaxed pause in service before being plied with strong coffee and Amaretto, perfectly complementing the house made carrot cake.

Steak houses aren't a place to seek value, they are temples of hedonism where you can be pampered and your taste buds blessed for 3 hours before you return to the real world that waits outside the door.
 
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#127
ak56 said:
The Family Pancake House near me has a $4.99 Steak and Egg special on Wednesdays.

Gotta be good, right?
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I forgot their Thursday night special is TWO steak dinners for $20. Gotta be even better!


PS: I haven't eaten is this place for nearly 30 years, because of issues with their food. Spaghetti shouldn't be nearly ice cold (I'm not exaggerating) and Hollandaise sauce shouldn't look like it's a week old.

I do enjoy driving by and criticizing the bad spelling on their reader board.
 
#128
I'm always kind of amused by people who order steak at a restaurant, only to be disappointed. I can remember once eating at small town on the Texas coast. For some reason ALL FOOD tastes better near the ocean. I don't know why, I guess something about the air. Anyway a group of us went to a restaurant. Nothing out of the ordinary, but I knew the food would taste good. One of our friends ordered steak and, of course, he hated it. I ordered something like grilled chicken which came with a salad bar visit. Everything I ordered tasted great. Even the SALAD WAS AMAZING, I didn't even add any dressing it was that good. Again, it had something to do with the coastal air or whatever magic that is. But the guy who ordered steak didn't get the salad bar option. So he basically didn't enjoy anything about the meal. It seems like some people are just more difficult sometimes.
 
#130
Killed_by_Death said:
I'm generally not difficult to please, which is why I started the thread. Steak has been a let-down too many times. I should have known better!
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I don't mean difficult to please. But it seems like a couple of people I know like this just make it difficult for themselves. Like with one guy I suggested the burger at a certain steakhouse after an unsatisfactory experience. Now he's usually happy with that every time. And he has become an excellent steak chef at his home.
 
#132
ElectroVibe said:
I don't mean difficult to please. But it seems like a couple of people I know like this just make it difficult for themselves. Like with one guy I suggested the burger at a certain steakhouse after an unsatisfactory experience. Now he's usually happy with that every time. And he has become an excellent steak chef at his home.
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Honestly, while I never got a red seal as a chef, I was a cook for a good little bit and it paid my way through university - so I can easily say this with a hint of authority: the hardest things for a cook to make right are usually the easiest ones to make. Steak, mashed potatoes, fried onions, etc... If it's a dish that sounds intimidating and is out of the average person's wheelhouse, there's a bit less pressure because a person doesn't have a formed opinion on how to make it or how it should always taste - so if you screw up a bit it might not always matter so much (not that it would make it any more acceptable to screw up - everybody in that place that's waiting on their food is your mother, if you wouldn't serve it to her you sure as heck shouldn't let it get to them... unless you hate your mother, then think of somebody else, like the Queen, or the president or whatever, you get the idea). However, with the really simple comfort food type items - mac 'n cheese, steaks, etc... You had better be on top of your methods and watch it like a hawk, because everybody knows how that stuff should turn out. So you had better use some good whipping cream and kosher salt and gently fold - NOT stir - your mash; in the same vein, if somebody wants a steak - guess what, EVERYBODY knows how they like to make their own steak - if they ask for blue rare that thing had better be bleeding, otherwise that guy's not coming back. Anybody can screw up a steak at home, they come into your restaurant to get it done right, and not just right, RIGHT.

I've got a lot of sympathy for people that work at corporate chain restaurants because they've got to both please the customer (who can frequently be more forgiving than myself, but can also be a LOT less so) while also having to obey the limitations placed on them by higher up - which includes way more than the franchisee and immediate management. I could never bother with that kind of environment, I've walked off on some business owners who didn't know what decent food looked like as-is, and wasn't surprised to see those businesses shut their doors for good.
 
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#133
This is not directed at anyone here, but there is another way that people can be "difficult". For example, I don't care how good a restaurant's food is if the parking sucks. Or the same with the bathrooms. Those kinds of things are more important to me than the food quality to be honest. Especially if you are planning to meet people there who are driving separately and expecting them to find a good parking spot. Even worse, I've been to a supposedly GOOD and highly rated restaurant where the tiny bathroom consisted of one stall and zero urinals. Good luck if someone happens to be using the stall. I have never returned to that restaurant just on principle. Even if I knew I wouldn't need to use the restroom, I would never subject my guests to that kind of place.
 
#134
I'm a professional chef with an independent restaurant, so I'm just going to lay it all out and show you guys how the sausage is made.

First of all there are different grades of beef: Prime, Choice, Select, and Ungraded. Prime is the best and less than ten percent of beef is graded prime. Choice is good; the fat is marbled throughout, the cow was healthy, butchered right way, etc. If you pay to get your beef USDA graded and you ended up with Select, you just wasted your money. Ungraded beef is most of the time just as good or better than Select. I buy Choice, sometimes for special occasions I'll get Prime (New Years, St. Valentine's Day, etc.) and actually have Prime Rib. If someone is trying to sell you "Prime Rib" for $17, I guarantee it's an ungraded hunk of meat that got boiled off in Au Jus that started as a packet of powder. No Buys.

Number two, I have so many extra costs to operate a small business. For starters, it costs me $700 just to be open for the day. I have insurance out my rectal orifice. Unemployment insurance, fire insurance, flood insurance, are the big three. I have to make payments to ASCAP and BMI. I am absolutely taxed on everything, and the payroll tax on overtime is insane. It takes three air conditioners to cool the front of the house, and when the place is packed, it's still 80F (25C) in there. Twice a month, I have some sort of repair bill. Thermostat on a freezer, coffee machine, ice machine at the bar... it never stops. So all of this goes into the figuring out the menu pricing. In general, you want the food cost to run under 30%, and the cheaper the item, the profit margins need to be better. Sandwiches need to run closer to 15%-20%, and main entrees 28%-30%.

If I buy a choice ribeye for $10/lb., it's not actually $10/lb. After the steaks get trimmed and cut, it's actually closer to $13/lb. Hence, to get a 28% food cost out of a 12 oz. ribeye at $13 a pound, it's going to be $35 retail. But, it's quality meat, and it's grilled the right way. I make sure to teach my boys how to cook a steak. We slightly undercook things, because they're going to keep cooking a little bit off of the grill. Chain places have franchise-wide guidelines on how things are cooked. I've heard stories about line cooks throwing a steak on the grill at a Colton's Steakhouse and then hitting the "Medium" button. They don't teach them how to cook, they just to teach them how to follow directions. Then, that steak continues to cook for 2-3 minutes off of the grill, and then continues to slowly cook under that heat lamp while it waits to go out to the table.

So anywho, that's why restaurant food is expensive, and that's just so I can hopefully break even month-to-month.
 
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#137
Once it's been ordered, it comes out of the fridge, unwrapped and seasoned, and by the time that ticket gets started it's usually room temperature. Even on the coldest of January days, it's still 95F (35C) in that kitchen, so it only takes like five minutes.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not a high end steakhouse in a bustling metro area. I live in rural community and I keep my menu small. The only steaks I have full time on the menu are ribeyes, because that's what sells. I'll rotate other cuts in and out, but I generally have two steak options because I can't afford to have walk-in full of meat that doesn't sell (I try to have $2,000 or less of perishable inventory at any given time), and I can't have Prime Rib Phillies as my lunch special everyday ('cause then it's just a menu item).

I bought two ribeyes last Thursday at $9.10/lb. One came in at 11.9 lbs. and the other at 14.1. By the time they were trimmed and cut, I got the exact same yield out of both of them. I essentially bought $20 of extra fat and gristle on the large ribeye that wasn't on the smaller one.
 
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#138
The best steak I ever had was at a small town in the Pacific northwest. It was kind of a country dancehall place also. They served everyone the same exact thing. Your menu order was either YES or NO. That was it. But I've never had a better steak.
 

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