The Manual 2.0 
The Elite Meat to Eat
Hungry for a 24-ounce RIBEYE? Steak is back in a big way—and steakhouses are sizzling. From Buffalo Gap to Galveston and fancy to funky, here are the ten best places to get …
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Best Place to Do a Deal
Sullivan’s, Austin
300 Colorado, 512-495-6504. Opened 1996. Serves Certified Angus Beef that is wet aged for 17 to 21 days, seasoned with salt and pepper, and cooked in an upright broiler at 1,500 degrees. A twelve-ounce filet is $22.95, including a salad.
• Watch this spot. Open only ten months, it’s already becoming one of the Capital City’s preferred places for celebrity-spotting (Sam Shepard, Jerry Jones) and wheeling and dealing. Indeed, cigar smoke is already wafting into the dining room from the cacophonous piano bar up front. Developed by Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon of Wichita, Kansas (also the owner of Del Frisco’s), and the first outpost in a projected national chain with one hundred units, Sullivan’s easily has aced the city’s other red-meat competitors. With its dark mahogany-toned paneling, plush carpet, and wall of books, the ample, discreetly divided room evokes a forties supper club. The food is basic and excellent. Sullivan’s Caesar salad was fresh and well anchovied, but the sharper spinach salad—a fine pile of tender leaves with red onion and nibbles of mushroom in a terrific sweet-sour bacon dressing—was an almost better complement to a steak. The filet, a two-inch-thick knob of meat, was gorgeously tender and superbly cooked. What else? Crisp-tender green beans and horseradish mashed potatoes made excellent accompaniments (even if the latter was oddly deficient in horseradish), and the cheesecake was simply state of the art.
Best Steakhouse for Real Texas Food
Perini Ranch Steakhouse, Buffalo Gap
FM 89 at Buffalo Gap city limits sign, 915-572-3339. Opened 1983. Serves choice Angus or Angus-cross beef that is wet aged for 21 days, seasoned with garlic salt, pepper, beef bouillon base, and oregano, and grilled over mesquite. A twelve-ounce ribeye is $13.95, including salad and vegetable.
• There’s a fire in the redbrick hearth all winter long, chile ristras hang from ancient shutters, and mesquite smoke drifts from the flagstone terrace out back. Tom Perini’s place comes by its weathered wood honestly, having been a hay barn before its reincarnation as a steakhouse. Regulars make the fourteen-mile drive from Abilene, bringing visiting VIPs and location-bound movie stars (when Duvall and Eastwood aren’t at the Fort Griffin General Merchandise, they’re likely to be here). The menu’s mainstays are its flavorful, reasonably tender steaks, but an equal if not greater draw is the spread of grandmother-quality Southern vegetables and desserts. At any given time, you’ll find some of the following: ranch-style beans; black-eyed peas; chunky, garlicky “cowboy potatoes”; cheese-topped zucchini Perini; flat green beans with bacon; and mesquite-roasted, cayenne-butter-drenched corn on the cob with the shucks pulled back to make a handle. Perini’s whiskey-spiked bread pudding must not be missed, and his great peppered filets are available by mail.
Best High-Volume Steakhouse
Taste of Texas, Houston
10505 I-10, just inside Beltway 8, 713-932-6901. Opened 1977. Serves Certified Angus Beef that is wet aged for 30 to 35 days, optionally seasoned with garlic butter or lemon pepper, and cooked on a gas grill at 500 degrees. A ten-ounce filet is $23.95, including salad and a side dish.
• Who can eat steak at four on a Saturday afternoon? A lot of people can. A couple dozen of them were milling about on the porch when the restaurant opened, and in a short while the place was full. At first glance, Taste of Texas seems to be just another middle-of-the-road steakhouse, but the appearance deceives. The Certified Angus steaks are excellent; the branding irons, plows, and carpetbags on the walls are real; and the youthful servers provide the most intelligent, punctilious service of any steakhouse I visited. This well-schooled crew can declaim about cuts of beef and pace a meal with equal aplomb. If you explain (as I did) that you have a plane to catch, they move at warp speed. My filet (ordered without either of the two house seasonings, but accompanied by a pretty decent béarnaise sauce) was superb. The four grilled spears of fresh asparagus came with a dollop of hollandaise that was also surprisingly good. True, the polenta was soggy from the steak’s natural juices and the galumphing jalapeño-and-cheese-stuffed shrimp were way overbreaded, but considering what you get for your money, I was more than pleased.
Best Steakhouse on the Coast
The Steakhouse at the San Luis Hotel, Galveston
5222 Seawall Boulevard, 409-744-1500. Opened 1996. Serves prime beef that is dry aged for three weeks, sprinkled with Lawry’s seasoned salt, cooked in an upright broiler at 1,400 degrees, and served in a demiglace-based jus. A ten-ounce filet is $18.95 à la carte.
• Galveston has never been a culinary mecca. Oh, sure, there’s Gaido’s, but generally speaking, urbanity and finesse have been in short supply. No more. The San Luis’ Steakhouse more than passes muster in the menu and decor departments and with time will surely bring its earnest but occasionally muddled service up to par. The burnished, mahogany-toned paneling and tufted-leatherette booths recall luxe supper clubs of decades past, while the prime beef and the pricey wine list whisper “expense account.” For the most part, chef Alan Blumenfeld’s kitchen delivers. Here the clichéd iceberg lettuce wedge of yore is half a head of the stuff in irresistible Roquefort dressing jauntily strewn with carrot and cabbage confetti; the huge grilled mushroom caps are stuffed with crabmeat and smothered in melted Gruyère; the lemon soufflé positively defies gravity; and the voluptuous, finely marbled steaks are a carnivore’s dream.
Best Steakhouse for Wine Lovers
Billy Crews, outside El Paso
1200 Country Club Road, in the El Paso suburb of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, 505-589-2071. Opened 1956. Serves choice beef that is wet aged for thirty days, seasoned with salt and pepper, and grilled over charcoal at 400 degrees. A twelve-ounce filet is $15 à la carte.
• Listen up, oenophiles. You want to order only two things here: a big endive salad (off the menu) and a well-marbled ribeye. Do not accept a roll, do not order vegetables, do not have dessert (well, some people swear by the butterscotch pie). Custom cut and well grilled, the red meat is fine, but the side dishes are strictly 1957 country club bordering on covered-dish supper. The main reason to order judiciously here, however, is to save room to savor one of the country’s great wine lists—a loose-leaf notebook eighty pages long with 1,500 choices at prices a mere 25 percent above retail. So amazing is this list that for ten years running Wine Spectator magazine has given Billy Crews one of its coveted Grand Awards, bestowed annually on only 96 restaurants worldwide. Consider, for example, a 1990 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley) for $30, or a 1989 Grgich Hills Zinfandel for $25. And a near-mythic 1945 Château Margaux (Margaux vineyard) is a steal at $1,200. So adjust your priorities. At most places you order wine to accompany your meal. At Billy Crews you have a steak to accompany your wine.
Most Outrageous Steakhouse
Big Texan Steak Ranch, Amarillo
7701 I-40 East, 806-372-6000. Opened 1960. Serves prime beef that is wet aged for 45 to 60 days, sprinkled with Lawry’s seasoned salt, cooked on a gas grill at 400 degrees, and served with a soy-and-bouillon-based jus. A ten-ounce filet is $22.99, including cornbread, soup, salad, and potato.
• Like Las Vegas, Elvis, and Roseanne, the Big Texan is notably lacking in style and decorum, but its 300,000 customers a year don’t care. The freewheeling home of the infamous 72-ounce steak (eat one in an hour and get it free) is big, tacky, fun, and frequently packed with folks who look like they just pulled up in a Greyhound from a bingo parlor. In short, the Big Texan is a trip. Check out the gift shop and applaud the plucky local opry singers who perform on Tuesday nights. Brave the frontal system of cigarette smoke in the waiting area to play the mock slots at 25 cents a pop. After you polish off your steak (72 ounces or not) in the dining room with its Western-saloon motif, stagger to your room in the Big Texan’s handy motel next door. The point here is not the terminally average side dishes and thinnish, coarse-textured (but tender) steaks that seem more like low-level choice than the declared prime—but tradition. Let other steakhouses rush to embrace the sophistication of the nineties. The Big Texan celebrates the Lone Star State’s rough and rowdy alter ego.
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