Steakhouses: Which icons and newbies are worth the money?
A steak dinner represents success, earning power, prosperity. For a century, your ability to afford a juicy rib-eye at a good restaurant at your leisure has signaled your proximity to the American dream.
And we notice when we have to eat something else. President Herbert Hoover is said to have promised Americans “a chicken in every pot” (a promise he couldn’t deliver on), then he pissed off a nation by letting a movie crew film him feeding T-bone pieces to his dog in the Rose Garden. By then, millions of citizens could barely afford chicken.
After World War II, Kansas City and Chicago stockyards filled again with cattle, and beef became less expensive and more easily available. USDA data show that beef consumption in the United States has nearly doubled over the past 100 years. To eat all that beef, we turn to a broad spectrum of possibilities, from low-budget buffet-grill concepts (Golden Corral, Ryan’s) to high-end operations (the Capital Grille, Fogo de Chão). You no longer have to be upper-middle-class to afford a steak dinner. But having plenty of scratch helps if you want a great steak dinner.
Kansas City’s steakhouses operate at every price point, from a 16-ounce, $18.49 USDA-choice sirloin at the Olathe Texas Roadhouse to the 36-ounce Tomahawk steak at the Capital Grille, dry-aged for 40 days and priced at $80. (People still believe in the steak as status symbol, you see.)
Both of the above restaurants are chain operations, but Capital Grille has definitely stolen thunder from local steak joints. Iconic places such as Plaza III and Jess & Jim’s Steakhouse (the oldest beef venue in the metro and nationally famous since Calvin Trillin’s gushing Playboy paean in 1972) face plenty of competition. I wanted to see how well the local beef barns held up against outsiders — and whether these places’ most expensive steaks were worth it.
Rye KC
The 11-month-old Rye KC, the homespun suburban cousin to the cosmopolitan Bluestem, run by James Beard Award–winning chef Colby Garrelts and his wife, Megan, is better-known for its deep-fried chicken than for its “Reserve Steak Program” — available only at dinner, from a separate menu.
Five beefsteak options are on the list, including a 16-ounce slab of prime rib that’s prepared only on Sundays. All of the steaks are USDA Choice (except the center-cut filet mignon, which is USDA Prime), from Foster Farms in California.
Wait, California? Jeremy Lamb, Rye’s general manager, explains the Garreltses’ choice this way: “The beef we serve isn’t fattened up with whole corn. The ranchers feed them cornflakes.”
“Do you mean,” I asked, “like Kellogg’s?”
“No, more like flakes of corn integrated with traditional corn feed. Whole corn disrupts a cow’s digestive system.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about cattle calmly eating from giant bowls filled with breakfast cereal, so I called Colby Garrelts. He laughed and told me, “That’s not true at all. If I find the right producer, I do use Kansas beef. But for our volume, we just try to find the best beef, no matter where it comes from. The Foster family farms [beef] is well-marbled and good-sized, so we can cut a thick steak. We hand-select all of our beef. But no, they don’t eat cornflakes.”
Whatever they eat, it works. Rye’s rib-eye, one of the best-selling cuts here, is as rich and flavorful as any beef I’ve tasted. The cut I sampled arrived beautifully prepared, buttery and tender. It had been dry-aged for 14 days before the chefs grilled it. At $44, it’s not cheap, but it does include soup or salad and one side dish, and I’d order it again even if it didn’t.
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Plaza III
When Joe and Bill Gilbert and Paul Robinson opened Plaza III, in 1963, it was the fanciest place for steaks in Kansas City. The half-century since has delivered plenty of ups and downs, but until recently, the place had remained relevant.
Today, though, Plaza III is something of a caricature of its glorious former self.
The menu has stayed pretty much the same over the decades, though its prices have soared. The dark, masculine dining room would look even more shopworn if someone turned up the lights. But one diner’s Miss Havisham is another’s warm nostalgia, and this oldest restaurant tenant on the Country Club Plaza still commands loyalists.
Plaza III’s slow-roasted prime rib, available regular or thick-cut, is outstanding and exquisitely flavorful. The center-cut Kansas City strip also gets high points for flavor and texture, but let’s be real here: It’s hard to do a bad strip.
With such big-name competition on the Plaza, Capital Grille and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, it may be time for the Plaza III owner to look more to the Jess & Jim’s model as a means of survival — to paraphrase Quentin Crisp: “I don’t try to keep up with Joneses. I drag them down to my level.” The Plaza could benefit from a steak joint that forgoes the little niceties that no one cares about — the relish tray comes to mind — and offers some real bang for the buck.
Like the competition’s high-end steak, a Plaza III steak is presented a la carte. And the extras are too expensive. Sure, the 1-pound baked spud — as big as a size 9 shoe — is big enough to comfortably feed two hungry people, but it’s an extra nine bucks, and who shares a baked potato anyway? You want a salad with that steak? Toss in another ten-spot.
All of the steaks served here are USDA Prime, but so are those at Jess & Jim’s — and cheaper. The servers at Plaza III still roll out a cart prior to ordering with an example of every cut of meat listed on the menu (and a few of the vegetables for good measure), wrapped in plastic, and they perform a lifeless little sales pitch.
No longer, though, is a tank of fresh lobsters at the front of the restaurant, like in the old days. But if you’d like a lobster tail with your steak, it’s an additional $29, which is just what the most expensive cut of beef at Plaza III cost a few years ago.
Jess & Jim’s Steakhouse
Let’s say you wanted to combine the best aspects of Plaza III and a Ponderosa Steakhouse (there hasn’t been one in the metro for years, but you remember). I suspect you’d end up with something like Jess & Jim’s, a cruelly lighted, noisy venue that serves mostly fine steaks. The meat is affordable, which makes sense only in an atmosphere so casual that you could probably walk in wearing a bathrobe without drawing so much as a glance.
This place has been a lovable joint since Jess Kinkaid and Jim Wright opened their 135th Street saloon in 1938. There wasn’t much happening in the hamlet of Martin City to suggest that the bar (which moved to a different but nearby location after a tornado razed part of the town in 1957) would become a destination, but Trillin made the place an overnight snoot magnet by calling it “the finest steakhouse in the world.”
Well, it wasn’t then and it isn’t now. But Jess & Jim’s remains one of the best-loved places in the city, and you can indeed have a first-class steak dinner without putting any of your belongings on eBay afterward. Yes, the beef here can be expensive; a Sterling Silver brand, USDA Prime 30-ounce porterhouse goes for $43.99. But that’s a hell of a lot of meat, and it comes with a hell of a lot of sides.
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I prefer the bacon-wrapped filet (offered in three sizes), which is supremely tender. The Kansas City strip isn’t the finest in town, but even it is well-marbled and flavorful and, like all the steaks here, delivered furiously spitting and sizzling on a white-hot aluminum platter.
Anton’s Taproom and Restaurant
Downtown Kansas City suffered a beefy blow when it lost, in a relatively short period of time, both the Hereford House restaurant, at 20th Street and Main, and Benton’s Prime Steakhouse, in the Westin Crown Center Hotel. Both dining spots had been popular with tourists for decades — visitors want a real Kansas City steak, right? — while giving local diners fair bang for the buck (at least in their heydays).
Anton Kotar more than takes up the slack with his namesake saloon, which feels like a bar that happens to serve food from the adjoining butcher shop. This may be the only steak joint in the metro that offers both grass-fed and grain-fed beef, cut to order and priced by the ounce. The meat is butchered and aged in-house. (The 28-day steaks are slightly more expensive.) Because Kotar purchases the meat directly from an area ranch, the beef is USDA-inspected but not USDA-graded.
Believe me, though, this beef gets the highest marks: divinely succulent, ruby-red beefsteak that the kitchen staff butchers into filets, Kansas City strips and rib-eyes that are expertly cooked to deliver a head-spinning buttery richness.
The grass-fed steaks are leaner but have their own distinctly herbed essence (which I find extremely appealing). The prices can be as high as you want them to be. If you’re as flush as Diamond Jim Brady (who loved sirloin, but only after polishing off a couple of roasted ducks and a few lobsters), you can go wild with a Flintstones-sized rib-eye, or a 4-ounce filet that’s respectably budget-friendly but still contains more perfect notes than “Rhapsody in Blue.” Every cut I sampled justified its price.
Laid-back and boisterously crowded, Anton’s is the antithesis of the expense-account-mecca Capital Grille, and it’s not much like what you think of when you recall the pink hues and lobster tanks of yesteryear’s steakhouses. But right now, it might just be the most authentic, least pretentious KC steakhouse — a no-nonsense Great Plains hangout for people who care more about what’s on the plate than what’s on the walls. Anton’s has some good paintings on display, but the real works of art come on the plates.
