November 13, 2002

Beef is the motif

By Paul Reidinger

AS ONE'S TERMS of engagement with the world of meat become ever more complex and tenuous, one is surprised (yet not at all surprised) to find the subject becoming one of passionate relevance. Or, to paraphrase the always paraphrasable Dr. Johnson, when you know you are to give up beef in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

No serious thought here, of course, of giving up beef altogether, in a fortnight or indeed ever, though in our minuscule realm we have all but abandoned pork (except for the odd sausage) in favor of ingeniously deployed poultry, and lamb was never a staple. But beef is a conundrum. It raises ethical issues about our relationship to other mammals, and it raises issues of health – our own and that of the planet. No one would dispute, surely, that we could live without beef: without grilled steaks, rolled roasts, barbecued ribs, double cheeseburgers, and carne asada burritos; though it would be a poorer life without them.

But it is the rare restaurant that doesn't offer beef in some form on its menu. And beef is, for the home cook, a kind of safe house, the meal that will be reliably fabulous regardless of the cook's skill and ambition. Beef is arguably the most forgiving of foods; it asks so little – a little salt and pepper, a little heat but not a lot – and gives so much. When someone invites you to dinner with the advisory that the main course will be beef, you rest easy. You know you're not going to be experimented on or served something inedibly weird or ruined.

You might even be served Kobe beef – the richly marbled Japanese meat, produced from Wagu cattle that are plied with beer and then massaged – as we were on a recent Saturday evening. Our hosts had procured four Kobe beef New York steaks at a price just shy of $30 a pound and prepared them with exquisite simplicity: by letting them come to room temperature, lightly seasoning them with salt and pepper, then tossing them into unoiled, preheated iron skillets for about four minutes per side.

Kobe beef is renowned for its tenderness, but we did not find it to be extraordinarily more tender than less exalted sorts of beef. It was rich and tasty – a result of all that marbling. (Side effect of marbling: huge clouds of penetratingly fragrant smoke I could smell in our clothes when I sorted them for the wash the following morning. It was as if we'd spent the night in some bar where people smoked beef cigarettes.) It was, said one of our hosts, the best steak he'd ever eaten. I could not complain; I liked the meat, almost as much as I liked the homemade french fries and the Beaulieu cab and the homemade pear-hazelnut torte we ate for dessert. But $30 a pound? It's a bit like putting premium fuel in your Honda Accord.

As it happened, we found ourselves the following evening at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. No Kobe beef here; just aged prime beef, broiled at 1,800°F and served, unadorned except for the jus, on a white platter. We found the petite filet ($26.95), cooked medium rare, to be indistinguishable from the previous night's Kobe beef strip steaks – possibly a bit gamier from the aging, in which moisture is lost and flavor accordingly concentrated.

Ruth's Chris (one of many around the country) has a wood-paneled mutedness one associates with a London men's club. With its many booths, its carpeting, and its soft (though not dim) lighting, it is an ideal sort of place to go for mealtime conversation. It also offers a surprising array of nonbeef dishes, from consanguineous broiled lamb chops ($29.95), to such meat-free preparations as a genuinely spicy Louisiana gumbo ($7.95) with chunks of crayfish; seared ahi ($11.95), sliced into thin squares of iridescent ruby and served with finely shredded daikon and a sauce of ginger, mustard, and beer; and chop salad ($7.25) – a compacted disk of iceberg lettuce, spinach, and radicchio, with chopped olives, mushrooms, red onions, hearts of palm, croutons, cherry tomatoes, bacon, and eggs, topped by a showering of deep-fried onions and a good dousing of lemon-basil dressing.

Fat, you say? Yes, fatty calories are present from beginning to end – and, speaking of endgames, a single serving of house-made cheesecake ($5.95) was (like an earlier dish of creamed spinach, at $5.95) more than enough for four. You might say Ruth's Chris's entire menu is as well marbled as it is well executed.

I cannot say that, when Monday morning (finally) dawned, I was filled with a craving for beef, or indeed for any meat. Beef does sate, even to the brink of queasiness. Our Kobe beef debauch was, I suspect, a once-in-a-lifetime event. And our Ruth's Chris friends told us that, much as they love the restaurant, they make the pilgrimage only two or three times a year. After that kind of meal, we all need some restorative therapy – a beer, say, and a massage.