Sunday, March 14, 2010

My Favorite Steakhouse Picks Part 3: Prime House (food)

Prime House is one of my favorite steakhouses for a few reasons. It's conveniently located at 27th St and Park Ave South, it's elegant and big yet simple, and it has one of my favorite cuts of steak in the city. In fact, it's my favorite restaurant of the BRGuest restaurant group by far. While it's not actually affiliated with David Burke's Prime House Chicago (although I think they probably were once), all their steaks do originate from Prime, the bull at Creekstone Farms that sires all the beef that goes into Burke's Prime House in Chicago.

Knowing the gluttony that I was in store for, I opted to start with the classic caesar salad. It's definitely expensive at $11 for just the salad, and I usually add the imported white anchovies for $3, but it's a nice way to start the meal.

The server prepares the dressing table-side.

The finished product with the anchovies on top. I wish the romaine pieces were larger though. I tend to like larger pieces of lettuce in my salad.

My friend SM had the French onion soup to start. SM said it was ok, not great, which makes it even easier for me to avoid ordering it. I just think that much cheese would bog me down for the food coming up.

We both went with the signature cut, the 65 day aged bone-in rib eye. At 20 oz, this thing is huge. As you can see, there's not that much bone there, and all of it is good edible steak without pockets of concentrated fat. The steak has great flavor, and was cooked a perfect medium rare.

More cheese on the creamed spinach. Didn't need it, and it was ok but not great.

The hash browns were a little greasy and not as crisp as I would like. My favorite hash browns by far are the ones at Morton's (with McDonald's coming in second?).

Here's where it gets crazy. For dessert, we split the Slice of Prime, their 7 layer fudge cake served with malt crunch ice cream. The cake was delicious without being just overly decadent, and while the ice cream that night was coffee and not malt, it was still pretty good.

Here's a view from the other side but I still don't think it does it justice. I probably should have included a birds' eye view. This thing was absolutely humongous. For $10, I want to declare this dessert the best steakhouse value in NYC. There's a smaller, $6 version available at lunch.

Most regular people could probably just come in and get the steak and the cake and expect to be completely full, a terrific value at $62+t/t.

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