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"FacebookPinterest\n\nA few days before the seventh game of last year's World Series, I called the Hillmont in Hollywood and asked if I could come in for a steak after the final out. I don't pretend to know more about cuisine than most restaurant critics, but I've put in enough time as a sportswriter that I understand baseball better than anybody else preoccupied with food, except restaurateur Rusty Staub. I figured the Anaheim Angels, down three games to two against the San Francisco Giants, would stretch the Series, and I was right.\n\nWithout identifying myself, I got into a discussion with the fellow on the phone about when the last sirloin would go on the fire. Finally, he told me I needn't watch the game in my hotel room but could come into the restaurant during the game. He made it sound as enticing as an invitation to a luxury box at the ballpark. \"Come in and watch it with us in the kitchen,\" he said. \"Sit right here and watch with me.\" I asked his name, and he turned out to be Robert Luna, the Hillmont chef.\n\nI assured him I'd be there. Just to reciprocate his friendliness, I asked if his steaks were as good as I'd heard.\n\n\"Better,\" he replied.\n\nI was in Los Angeles to check out the newest West Coast dining trend. It wasn't so long ago that sushi-sated Southern Californians only indulged their secret passions for the bloody (sirloin), the crunchy (hash browns) and the creamy (spinach) when they flew cross-country to take a meeting in New York. Now steak houses are so seriously regarded that the chuck wagon could well supplant the Mercedes as a local status symbol. A friend who recently moved from L.A. to New York told me the reason was the long-awaited decline of the overly influential 1960s, which mandated macrobiotic food for the masses. Another L.A. friend, Merrill Shindler, a food-talk-show host and Zagat editor, said, \"We are going back to substance. Isn't it nice to have substance on your plate when you have none in your movies?\" Also impossible to ignore is the influential New York Times Magazine article from last year that endorsed the high-protein Atkins diet, which had been in medical disrepute. Now it's the greatest thing since sliced steak.\n\nThe steak house, as it exists in New York, is as set in granite as Grant's Tomb. Wood paneling is either polished so thoroughly it gleams like a well-marbled rib eye or neglected so completely that building inspectors check regularly for dry rot. Walls are papered with caricatures or publicity stills of minor celebrities, dead from blocked arteries, whom customers wouldn't recognize if they rose up and walked in. Waiters are elderly, male and unattractive, and they speak among themselves in ancient Eastern European tongues. Knives are thick and smooth handled, the kind perfectly balanced for bringing down a bounding antelope with the flick of a wrist. Most often imitated outside New York, though to no good purpose, are the nonoperational overhead fans, repositories of dust and grease.\n\nThe New York steak house, like the Augusta National Golf Club, was created for men. The classic client is an overdressed, overpaid, overmarried Wall Streeter with newly cut hair and thick-soled shoes, ordering a triple-digit Cabernet he wouldn't know from a $20 Merlot if he peeked during a blind tasting, which, of course, he would. The last time I ate in Manhattan's Palm, the guy seated at the next table was boasting about his new industrial-size Weedwacker, so huge he had to strap it to his body and so dangerous it came with a safety helmet he refused to wear.\n\nIn Los Angeles at the time I called the Hillmont, I wasn't finding much that reminded me of New York. Of the new steak houses, Arroyo Chop House in nearby Pasadena came closest to imitating the eastern model, although a pianist performing songs from The Phantom of the Opera didn't do much for the manly ambience. I saw families with babies at Celestino Italian Steakhouse, groups enjoying pretheater dinners at Nick &amp;amp; Stef's, beautiful women in designer dresses at Balboa and the same sorts of fashionable couples at Jar who used to go there when Jar was Indochine. The most depressing comment I heard came from my waiter at Arroyo Chop House after I mentioned that the place lacked the requisite lopsided ratio of men to women. He proudly replied, \"Women come here with other women to celebrate birthdays.\" I hope I don't live to see the day when waiters in New York steak houses sanction women's groups.\n\nThe new L.A. steak houses have no attitude whatsoever, which is understandable, given that Southern California waiters are inclined to dote on customers. More difficult to forgive than all the sweetness is the less-than-stellar beef I was served everywhere. It's not like L.A. doesn't have a long-standing relationship with cows\u2014why do you think so many Westerns were made out there? One excuse I can think of is that steak houses have been out of fashion for so long that nobody knows how to buy meat anymore. Or maybe I simply shouldn't have expected much from steaks that come from Los Angeles, just as Los Angeles doesn't expect much from films that come from Queens.\n\nDuring my eight days in L.A., I tried twenty steaks. Four of them were first-rate, and one among those\u2014a filet mignon at Jar\u2014was perfection. It was so enticingly beefy, crusty and juicy I found myself reaching over and grabbing chunks of meat from the plate of the friend who had ordered it. A steak like that, one so irresistible that the pleasure of eating increases with every mouthful and the final bite brings sadness, might embody the ultimate dining experience for an American. (A Frenchman probably feels the same way about foie gras.) The complexity of that fillet shocked me, for two reasons. It's a cut that seldom rates accolades, and this particular fillet had not been dry aged, which we easterners consider the secret of emplary beef. (In wet aging, meat is enclosed in plastic. In dry aging, it remains open to the air. In both cases, enzymes tenderize the meat, but dry aging is thought to improve flavor and firmness by concentrating the meat.)\n\nNick &amp;amp; Stef's, owned by acclaimed restaurant entrepreneur Joachim Splichal, serves dry-aged steaks. The meat hangs inside a glass-enclosed viewing room, a swell idea in principal although in practice not so appealing\u2014fluorescent lighting has the same aesthetic effect on a steak that it does on a woman. Unfortunately, the steaks my friends and I ordered were cooked horribly; they came to the table gray, flabby and crustless. The highlight of this meal was the seemingly endless selection of inexpensive and generous vegetables, including wonderful creamed corn and onion rings.\n\nIn addition to a multitude of new-style steak houses that includes Nick &amp;amp; Stef's, the Hillmont, Jar, Arroyo Chop House, Celestino Italian Steakhouse, Mastro's and Porterhouse Bistro, I tried a few creaky, antiquated spots. On my list of old-timers were Taylor's Prime Steaks (where not all the steaks are prime), Billingsley's (getting dumpier by the day) and the Original Pantry (a bona fide joint). The architect David Rockwell was once kind enough to explain to me the difference between a dump and a joint\u2014a joint has always looked the way it does, while a dump is the end result of a long decline.\n\nI rarely visit Los Angeles without stopping at the Pantry, and when I'm there I always order the same meal: coleslaw, hash browns and the \"hamburger steak.\" (I believe the absence of a bun is what makes this hamburger a steak in the opinion of the management.) The place has globe lights, heavy crockery, cheap flatware and a dull patina. What I particularly love about the Pantry is the rumor that all the employees are ex-convicts, which I refuse to check out because I don't want to find out it's untrue. A counterman who served me a bowl of clam chowder while I was waiting for a friend to join me for lunch sure looked as though he'd received a pardon from the governor. He was an old guy with a buzz cut who kept a secret stash of snacks and chewed as he worked. The chowder came without a smile.\n\n\"Doesn't seem to like me,\" I said to the big guy on the next stool.\n\n\"It started long before you got here,\" he replied.\n\nWhen my friend arrived, we moved to a table for steaks. He had the T-bone, and I had the New York strip. They were tough. My mashed potatoes and gravy could have been Devil's Island cuisine.\n\nTaylor's and Billingsley's are bargain-priced steak houses that have been around so long their neighborhoods have changed, and not for the better. Billingsley's is practically under the 405 freeway. Taylor's is on a street in Koreatown not far from a dollar store and a restaurant with the irresistible name of Ham Hung. I admired Taylor's for its well-maintained permanence. The exterior is consummate '70s, a windowless stucco blockhouse. Inside, the carpet is red, the vinyl booths spacious and the chairs set on casters, which permits the overstuffed to push back and arise easily. Rest rooms are conveniently placed in the center of the dining room, reminiscent of the proud days when men would get up from their table, hitch up their pants and head off to relieve themselves.\n\nMy \"luncheon New York steak\" was tender, flavorful and preternaturally juicy, as though it had been marinated. I considered it one of the four top steaks of my trip. The mashed potatoes were fine and the French fries crunchy and appealing, much better than those ordinarily found in New York steak houses. Little did I know that French fries would ultimately rate as the crowning achievement of Los Angeles steak houses.\n\nBillingsley's, owned by the sons of Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver on TV, is the flip side of Taylor's. It has small booths, worn hotel-hallway carpeting and a few aquariums wedged between booths. Only the Halloween decorations looked fresh. The salads had been premade and seemed to come straight from cold storage. The dreary \"Billingsley's potatoes\" reminded me of the sort served at 3 A.M. in twenty-four-hour diners. The steak was adequate, crosshatched and salty, although the prime rib was inedible. It tasted artificial, with no beefy flavor. With cooking like this, no wonder the Beaver was always coming home late to dinner.\n\n\n\nI thought Balboa might be it: the prototype for the classic Southern California steak house. It's a boutique restaurant within a boutique hotel and sits across the street from the Miramax building, where Harvey Weinstein and pals dine on robatayaki in the lobby restaurant Katana. Robatayaki is so ultrahip we unenlightened New Yorkers have no idea what it is.\n\nBalboa is the steak house as scene, a concept that hasn't caught on in New York, where our steak houses are still about meat. As a friend and I walked to our table, he pointed out a model in a backless dress gulping a fillet and said, \"She looks like a python swallowing a rabbit.\"\n\nAt the tiny table next to ours sat a dysfunctional, ready-for-MTV family. The nearly insane daughter, unable to control her lip liner, had painted a Douglas Fairbanks mustache on herself. She spoke furiously on a cell phone throughout her meal, occasionally wandering outside when the conversation became too intense. At Balboa it's not just the customers that are worth a look. The wood is burnished, the light fixtures high-tech and the steak knives dagger-thin Laguiole. A partition separating two of the seating areas seemed fabricated from twigs. I peered inside, looking for swallows building nests. The menu was intriguing and expensive, and I was thrilled to find 2000 Hitching Post Pinot Noir on the wine list. Cool and spicy Bloody Mary oyster shooters came with tiny fresh oysters, exactly right. A ham-onion-and-blue-cheese tart was a respectable idea diminished by ham bits overcooked into tough nubs. Each table was allocated a lonely pat of butter to accompany the baked goods, slices of baguette that evoked the Poppin' Fresh kind from your grocer's freezer. Ordering a steak entitles the diner to a choice of a crust or a sauce. We picked the blue-cheese crust (a goopy mess) for the \"bone-in Kansas City filet\" and the b\u00E9arnaise sauce (soupy but palatable) for the aged New York strip.\n\nThe steaks were fine, particularly the strip, which had been aged forty days. After that much ripening, steaks have left the bovine world and entered the netherworld. This forty-day steak, one of the best I came across, was soft and funky, not beefy and juicy, a necrocarnivore's delight. The delicious creamed spinach had just enough nutmeg and not too much white sauce.\n\nFor dessert, I selected \"New York Cheesecake,\" fully expecting something inane, and I wasn't disappointed. The portion was huge and pretty good, about a 6 on the Manhattan cheesecake scale of 1 to 10. It came with a soggy graham-cracker crust, two incongruous sauces (malted butterscotch and strawberry mint) and whole graham crackers stuck hither and yon\u2014there's nothing a man likes more than kindergarten cookies with his cake.\n\nA point here about steak-house desserts: None of them make any sense, no matter where the steak house is located. Steak-house dessert menus start with thuggish slices of cheesecake, conclude with bowls of unripe strawberries and pridefully offer irrational interpretations of cr\u00E8me brl\u00E9e and bread pudding. Men are not supposed to order desserts at steak houses. They are supposed to skip desserts at steak houses. This way they can return home and righteously inform their toe-tapping wives that even though they consumed a thirty-two-ounce porterhouse and downed four glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon, they passed on the Georgia pecan tart with cr\u00E8me Chantilly. I didn't admire any of the steak-house desserts in Los Angeles, but I have to admit they weren't any worse than the steak-house desserts in New York.\n\nOn our way out of Balboa, the friend who had eaten with me introduced me to the owner of Arroyo Chop House, where I hadn't been planning to go because nobody goes to Pasadena, even though it's only ten miles north of downtown L.A. I asked him how his steaks compared with those at Balboa, and he declared his \"the best fuckin' steak you'll ever have in your life. I guarantee it.\"\n\nThat seemed reason enough to go to Pasadena. I drove there the next night, and I have to admit his $7 chili appetizer may have been the finest chili I've ever had in my life. It had chunks of butter-soft beef and just enough beans to certify it as chili. (I'm not a Texas-style, no-beans guy.) The steaks were neither particularly well marbled nor worthy of laudatory invectives. Far worse than the chewiness of the beef was Arroyo's signature char, a layer of scorched sugar that transformed the meat into steak brl\u00E9. Three unbelievably inept sauces came with every order: peppercorn sherry, b\u00E9arnaise and Portobello-mushroom- Cabernet. Under the California Penal Code's three-strikes-and-you're-out provision, the saucier of Arroyo Chop House qualifies for life in prison.\n\nMy theory behind the ordinariness of the Arroyo Chop House steaks was that they hadn't been dry aged. Then I ate at Jar, and my dry-versus-wet certitude was shaken. Of all the steaks I tried in L.A., the greatest was Jar's wet-aged \"filet of beef.\" The absolute worst, by a considerable margin, was Jar's $29 bone-in dry-aged strip, which was undersized, overcooked, desiccated and tasteless. I left almost all of it on my plate.\n\nJar, which has celebrity-chef status (Mark Peel, Suzanne Tracht), is astoundingly bland in appearance and phenomenally noisy. The chairs are black plastic with odd cutouts, resembling those found in dentists' waiting rooms. When I inquired into their origin, my waitress haughtily informed me they had been designed by the famous Philippe Starck. I was impressed. I never knew Starck did dental offices.\n\nMastro's, in Beverly Hills, is the main competition to Balboa in the category of big-budget interior design, although I have a feeling that some of the ambience is secondhand; the space once housed the last revival of Chasen's. Truthfully, Mastro's is so dark I couldn't see that much. (A friend advised me that steak houses are dark so customers don't have to look at blood. I informed her that men aren't afraid of blood as long as it isn't their own.) In the downstairs dining room, where I was seated, customers with menus were grabbing the single candle at the center of their table and pulling it over to use as a reading light. I did the same, feeling like a character in a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.\n\nThe room was just bright enough for me to make out the people seated nearby, and I was profoundly disheartened to see I was among the underdressed and the unattractive. (I later learned that the second floor at Mastro's, a cross between a supper club and an airport lounge, is where the socially acceptable dine.) A woman at the table next to mine wore a hooded Adidas sweatshirt, just the kind of fellowship I seek when I'm paying $39.95 for a \"ribeye chop Chef's Cut,\" vegetables not included. The steak was good quality, well cooked and crusty, although not juicy enough to rate a forty-buck price tag. All steaks came accompanied by a lecture on the 1,800-degree oven in which they were cooked and the 400-degree plate on which they were served\u2014600 degrees, according to our busboy. There's something creepy about eating from a sizzling plate in near blackout conditions. Why not just blindfold customers, lead them into the kitchen and stick their hands in an oven?\n\n\n\nI speak now, in reverence, of the porterhouse, the double-cut bone-in steak for two, a slab of strip loin on one side, a chunk of fillet on the other. The porterhouse is the Escalade of steaks, a pageant on a plate, a cavalcade of gastronomic might. I ordered a porterhouse at two spots where it's a specialty, Porterhouse Bistro and Celestino Italian Steakhouse.\n\nThe high concept behind Celestino is a variation on la vacca piemontese, meat grown in the Piedmont region of Italy. The steaks served at Celestino, derived from Montana-bred relatives of Italian cows, are prepared florentine style, which means they are brushed with olive oil and rosemary and cooked over an open fire. The price for this steak, which was accompanied by nothing but a few wilted scallions, was $64. The outcome was what I had feared: tough meat, badly undercooked. I suspected it would be tough because I've eaten florentine steaks all over Italy, and they're always tough. I knew it would be undercooked because Celestino has a genuine Italian sensibility, and the only way to get an Italian to cook a steak medium rare is to let him see your shoulder holster. I'd asked for medium rare. I emphasized that I really meant medium rare. The waiter assured me it would be medium rare. It arrived nearly raw. The fillet side was tasty, as nearly raw filet mignon can be, but the strip-loin side was cold, gristly and unappealing. The Parmesan French fries didn't have much Parmesan flavor but were crunchy and delicious, as much fun to eat as salted peanuts.\n\nPorterhouse Bistro had a much better porterhouse than Celestino but looked much worse than Celestino. In fact, it looked worse than Jar. It felt cut-rate, as though the owners had run out of money during construction and switched to a motel-supply house. The dividers between booths are bathroom-style frosted glass, the plates are plain white, and the flatware is bulky. The payoff is two drinks and four courses\u2014well, it's sort of four courses\u2014for $29.95 per person. Course number one wasn't a course, by my standards. It consisted of \"dipping sauces,\" which were chopped tomatoes and a fishy creamy condiment that reminded me of condensed seafood chowder. I felt silly even thinking that, so I asked the waitress what it really was. It was condensed seafood chowder. I suspected the salads had come out of plastic bags. At that moment I was pretty happy that two mid drinks had been included with the meal, because I'd needed both of them to get through those first two courses.\n\nThen came a shockingly good thirty-ounce porterhouse for two. I don't believe it was prime meat, but it was expertly cooked and extremely tender. Accompanying the meat was a little pitcher of pure melted beef fat the waitress described as \"natural oils.\" That qualifies as the culinary euphemism of the year. The indubitably unhealthy idea is to pour on the fat, sprinkle on coarse salt and eat. The salt-and-fat upgrade worked wonderfully, making the porterhouse taste like prime beef. The French fries were simply perfect, the thick kind that Coney Island stands used to make back when the people who patronized Coney Island cared about what they ate. The desserts that made up course number four were better than average for a steak house, a modest compliment. The apple tart might have been worth recommending had it not been drizzled to death with caramel sauce.\n\nThere was even more for the money. On the way out, I received a complimentary Porterhouse Bistro ballpoint pen. I used it to write a postcard home to my wife, telling her that I had eaten wonderfully healthy meals in L.A. that emphasized natural oils.\n\n\n\nOn the Sunday of the seventh game of the World Series, I showed up at the Hillmont to watch the game with the chef. The place was empty at 6:15 P.M., which was fine with me. I didn't want company. I wanted that great seat by the TV.\n\nI didn't see any great seats, to tell the truth. The place is filled with long wooden picnic tables, the kind usually found at clam shacks and barbecue joints. The only amenity at the Hillmont is the roof.\n\nI asked for the chef, and the hostess said he'd taken the night off. I was a little surprised, given his eagerness to treat me as his closest friend, but I decided not to sulk. I asked the hostess for a seat where I could watch the game. She said there was no such seat.\n\nI didn't stay for dinner. I decided that if chef Robert Luna was lying about the TV, he was lying about the food being good."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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