Steak - Mark Schatzker [2]
I began chasing steak in earnest the year I got married. My wife and I went to Tuscany for our honeymoon, and on our second night there we ate at a restaurant in Florence called Del Fagioli, a cozy little spot with checkered tablecloths and big flagons of Chianti. The waiter did not recommend pasta, veal marsala, or anything else I had, until actually visiting Italy, thought of as Italian food. His advice: “Get the steak.” We did, and when I swallowed the first bite, I let out a string of four-letter words and fell silent for a duration lasting more than a minute. Then I swore some more. The steak was that good.
A few years later, I found myself on what may turn out to be the greatest journalistic assignment of the century. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, a glossy travel magazine called Condé Nast Traveler asked me to travel around the world in eighty days, the sole condition being that I wasn’t allowed to fly. I saw it as a well-funded steak excursion, and the first night I found myself driving through Chicago, a city famous for its excellent and huge steaks. I went to one of the pricier steak houses, one that claims to keep its own perfect bull down in Kentucky who has the enviable job of siring every one of the cows that provide the restaurant’s steaks. The rib eye they served me looked perfect: black on the outside and red in the middle. It tasted like grilled tap water. A few days after that, still heading west, I drove over the Sierra Nevada—not too far from my cousin’s pack camp—and dropped thrillingly down into California. That night I ate in the Napa Valley, and the steak was so good I decided to have a look at the local real estate prices, which ended up spoiling an otherwise perfect evening.
A cruise across the Pacific Ocean and a train ride north through China brought me to Mongolia, where I ate the worst steak of my life. It was a T-bone, half an inch thick, grilled over a gas flame and so tough that mid-chew I had to pause and let my jaw muscles rest. But it was only slightly more disappointing than a steak I once ate in Las Vegas at an old and hallowed steak house recommended by a hotel concierge who assured me it was better than all the others. The strip loin I ordered turned out to be more than an inch thick and looked too big to ever fit inside my body. It was expertly crisscrossed with gridiron marks, and as I cut into it, red liquid poured onto my plate. The level of expectation approached the dramatic, but that’s where the story ended, at expectation. The meat had a watery texture and hardly any beef taste. It was one of the most expensive steaks I had ever ordered, and also among the most insipid. I took bite after bite, incredulous that something that looked so beefy could taste so limp. Eventually, I gave up. The waiter removed my plate and said, “It’s a big serving.” I nodded sheepishly and paid the bill.
Steak was now a problem. It had become a culinary version of the weather in England: occasionally beautiful, but on the whole depressing.
Unlike the weather, however, steak was something no one paid any attention to. At steak house dinners, people would spend a minute, tops, deciding on what cut to order before turning to the wine list, which they studied like it was scripture. The meal would inevitably degenerate into an ad hoc seminar on grape varieties. Should we go with a California cabernet? No, a big zinfandel for sure. But not too oaky—I hate oaky. The steak itself enjoyed the same status as a napkin or the ice water: people just accepted what was given to them.
Why was it that, in steak houses all over North America, people were talking about grape varieties and not cattle breeds? Why was there an entire aisle at my magazine store devoted to wine magazines,