Steak - Mark Schatzker [9]
The ranch house is big and comfy, the kind of place a sun-weary Spanish cowherd could take the nap of a lifetime. Next to it is a creek-fed pond, and we sat on the bank and ate a lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise and mustard. As we ate, O’Brien warned against the dangers of letting the superficial trappings of wealth—fancy cars, society balls, yearly kitchen renovations—go to one’s head. He had bought the ranch from a man who’d wasted a lot of money on just that sort of frippery.
My hope was to taste some of O’Brien’s steak, but he didn’t have any available—or at least, none that he knew for certain was his. He gets his steak from his son, Alex, who is a former pro tennis player and owns a business selling premium-quality steaks, which he buys from Swift. Some of the steaks originate in O’Brien’s feedlots, and some in other feedlots, but no one knows which ones come from where exactly. On a single stretch of Texas highway, I saw four Swift trucks, all filled with boxed beef. Some of those boxes may have been O’Brien’s. Every day, all over the country, people are eating Palo Duro steaks, but no one is aware of it.
Ben E. Keith Foods, I later found out, buys beef from big companies. Sometimes Ben E. Keith buys its steak from Swift, though, according to their customer service representative, “not very often.” It is possible, then, but not likely, that the steak I ate at the El Vaquero came from just down the road. I will never know. The only Palo Duro product I can say with certainty that I ingested was a small amount of fecal dust, though not enough to taste.
Two cowboys were standing out front of the Big Texan Steak Ranch when I pulled in, one big and one small. The big one was wearing a white Stetson, chaps, and a red bandana around his neck and was so tall you couldn’t miss him from I-40. He was the restaurant’s sign—big enough to do battle with Godzilla and as perfect a specimen of Americana as the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” and Hollywood signs. The other cowboy, who had just walked down the restaurant’s patio steps, was wearing dark blue stovepipe jeans with a tight crotch, a big gold belt buckle, and a black Stetson. His lips were thin, his eyes were beady, and his face looked as though it’d seen its fair share of bad weather, real and metaphorical. A gimp leg gave the cowboy, who appeared to be in his sixties, a slow, clopping amble. You could almost hear dry desert earth crunching under the leather soles of his boots, even though he was walking over tarmac. Full of steak, he heaved himself into the cab of a Ford minivan and drove off.
Inside, the steak house is done up to look like a rickety old saloon (though it seems doubtful that any Old West saloon ever got so big). A young woman in a sexy cowgirl outfit called me “honey” and took me to my table. Country music was playing, and the heads of dead ungulates—deer, moose, elk—were mounted on the wall. I took a seat at a table on the balcony, which wraps around the main dining room. It occurred to me that if there were a shoot-out and I got hit, I would crash through the wooden picket railing and fall onto one of the tables below, just like in the movies.
A waitress appeared wearing the same sexy cowboy outfit as the hostess, though she was less sexy. “What can I get you, honey?” she asked, enthusiasm bubbling over. One thing Texans have realized is that men enjoy walking into restaurants and being addressed as “honey.”
The Big Texan serves a steak called “The Texas King” that weighs