Cock and Bull Story

I chickened out at the chop house. I just couldn’t work up enough nerve to ride the mechanical bull on any of my visits to the Saddle Ranch Chop House, even when one of the waiters offered to pay the $3 fee for me. After watching a dozen patrons climb atop the headless creature and get bucked off in fairly short order, I would have paid $3 not to ride the damned thing.

“I’d ride it, if my back wasn’t so bad,” claimed my friend Franklin, who’s enough of a daredevil that he probably would have ignored his back pain and hopped right on the bull if he’d been drinking. He was stone-cold sober that night, but he did enjoy watching the exhibitionists — some of them noticeably well-lubricated — go through the motions of signing a release, showing their ID (riders have to be 18 or older) and climbing on a machine that looks more like a gymnastic vault than an animal.

Only one rider actually looked like he knew what he was doing: a lean young man who turned out to be a Chop House employee. The rest of the would-be rodeo stars included a bald, broad-shouldered buck who was quickly tossed off the machine and a chunky chick who needed help just getting her fat rear up on the thing. To her credit, she lasted longer than Mr. Macho.

The audience in the dining room is totally forgiving, erupting into spontaneous applause even if the rider gets bucked off right away. The volunteer cowboys and cowgals are the night’s entertainment, after all, a modern version of a vaudeville amateur night in which no-talents would be yanked offstage by a stagehand wielding a long hook. The bull-riding show has its own theatrics — disco lights whirl, a puff of smoke spurts out from somewhere, and red lights bathe the amateur rider.

“Does the bull have a name?” I asked our server, Ryan, on the night I dined with Marilyn and Franklin.

“Well, it did, back when it used to have a head,” Ryan said. “The head kind of snapped off because the machine is so rough and everything.”

I could have encouraged him to give the bull some head, but double-entendre is one thing the Saddle Ranch already has in overabundance. The hunky waiters and pretty waitresses wear T-shirts urging patrons to “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” At least one waiter told me that the slogan is a siren call for some hungry customers who would prefer mounting the staff instead of the mechanical bull.

As for me, the ride out to the Legends was quite enough. It’s not a long journey, but it’s far enough that one of my dining companions announced, “It’s like going to another city … with a theme park.”

There is a theme-park quality to the Legends, and several of the dining venues there are bigger on gimmicks — Dave & Buster’s game arcades, T-Rex Café’s animatronic dinosaurs — than on cuisine. The California-based Saddle Ranch Chop House is more serious about food and way more ambitious. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner and, like the best old-fashioned diners, offers some breakfast dishes right up until the kitchen closes. I sampled only one dish that I thought was a clunker, but only because I’m pretty picky about fried chicken.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is easy to do at a place like this Chop House, which overloads the senses. Dozens and dozens of TV sets are mounted around the dining room, and the noise level is nearly as raucous as a real-life rodeo. Even the menu has a lot going on — it’s 12 pages long. Marilyn was confused to see oatmeal in the dinner section (it’s one of the late-night breakfast dishes), and Franklin wavered for a long time between the steak choices (all eight of them) and the deep-fried chicken before deciding on the latter.

All of the dinners include a vegetable, a spud and a basket of biscuits and cornbread muffins, which turned out to be a good thing for Franklin, who filled up on biscuits, mashers and gravy after discovering that his fried fowl was more about the breading than the bird. “It’s a very thick, somewhat gritty cornmeal crust,” he said sulkily. “The chicken’s moist, but you have to work hard to get to it.”

Marilyn, on the other hand, was enraptured with her “petite” version of Alaskan king crab legs. (The waiter told us that they were as “big as a midget’s arm,” and they were.) Marilyn complained bitterly about having to use a cracker to break open the tough shells, but she proved pretty adept at ripping apart the legs to get to the sweet, succulent meat. No double-entrendre intended.

I’m always wary of menu descriptions that promise a dish delivered “just the way you like it!” But the “classic” steak came pretty close — its surface had been char-grilled a tad too much, and it wasn’t the biggest hunk of meat I’d ever seen, but it was tasty.

Dessert, however, was definitely not the way I like it because it involved labor on my part. Reading the menu, I’d obviously missed the caveat printed in the “Create Your Own S’mores Platter” description: “Roast your own … at one of our outdoor fire pits.” The platter came with marshmallows, chocolate bars, graham crackers and wooden skewers; I had to walk through the dining room carrying marshmallows on a stick, step out to the patio “fire pit” and play Boy Scout. I returned with smoky marshmallows and burnt, sticky fingers. Next time, I’ll order the apple cobbler. Unless I have to bake it myself.

I had much more fun dining with Lorraine, if only because she was an enthusiastic audience for the bull riders. She clapped, yelled and added hilarious commentary each time a patron tumbled off. She was equally impressed by her dinner, a moist, double-thick pork chop served — like all the meals here — on an 18-inch metal platter. “It’s a great chop,” she said. “And the apple-bourbon sauce isn’t overbearing. It has just the right touch of sweetness.”

The best-selling dinner here is prime rib, according to our cocky waiter that night, Paul, who sold me on a slab of the Cowboy Cut. He didn’t steer me wrong — it was superbly roasted and really pretty luscious.

The following Saturday morning, I brought Lou Jane and a friend I’ll call “Tex” out to the Saddle Ranch for breakfast. This time, Santa was also eating there, so the dining room was crammed with families. Our trio was exiled to the Siberia known as the smoking section (adjacent to the gift shop), as far away from ol’ Santy and the tots as possible. We were thrilled by that turn of events, and things really looked up when Chris, the efficient bartender, took custody of our table and snappily brought out coffee (dreadful, by the way), a basket of biscuits and the biggest breakfast plates in town. Too big, really — most of the breakfast dishes, including the Country Steak Biscuit Platter that I devoured, are made with four eggs. There’s nothing like starting off the day with chicken-fried steak on a biscuit slathered with bacon gravy.

Lou Jane barely made a dent in her huevos rancheros, noting that it could feed a family of four. She did share part of my waffle, which was almost too big for its oversized platter. Tex, meanwhile, praised the Southwestern Eggs Benedict, which came smothered in a chipotle hollandaise sauce.

If I’d been a real hardworking cowboy, my supersized breakfast might have made sense. But I didn’t go out wrangling calves afterward — I went home and took a long nap.

It wasn’t the bucking bull, but too much food that knocked me on my ass.