Cowboy Lite
Kansas City’s steak joints — the famous ones — have such distinctive styles that it’s easier to describe them to folks who haven’t tried them yet by giving each restaurant recognizable human identities. The Capital Grille, for example, is a well-dressed Republican snob. Ruth’s Chris Steak House gives the impression of a showy chorus girl who inherited lots of money. The Savoy Grill remains a distinguished elder statesman, in contrast to Plaza III, a cheery, hale fellow well met. Benton’s Steak & Chop House rests like a dowdy doyenne on the laurels of her good reputation. Morton’s is a tweedy, humorless banker, and The Range, at Harrah’s Casino, comes off like a generous broad who likes a good time.
The 54-year-old Golden Ox, down in the West Bottoms, has the bravado of a broad-shouldered, rugged cowboy with simple but refined tastes — expensive whisky, well-marbled steaks, a big slab of apple pie. For many visitors to Kansas City, there’s no steak house that better evokes this city’s rowdy pioneer spirit than the Golden Ox, which has outlasted almost every other business in what was once the bustling, raucous West Bottom stockyards.
The stockyards (and the stores, pool halls, hotels and saloons that once surrounded them) are long gone, but the original Golden Ox goes on as if the neighborhood hasn’t changed a bit since 1951, when the area was flooded and the restaurant underwent its last major redecorating. In true Eisenhower-era fashion, salads are still served with a basket of cellophane-wrapped crackers and cubes of real butter. Even more shocking: The cost of the dinner still includes a salad and a vegetable.
You can say what you want about the dated décor, the lackadaisical service and lack of culinary inventiveness at the old Golden Ox, but it became a classic by not changing its style with every new dining trend that came along. The Golden Ox has the same virile appeal as the late John Wayne — a movie star for fifty years thanks to a solid, all-American persona — and it’s just as timeless.
The new Golden Ox, however, is a horseman of a different color. The restaurant’s owner, Jerry Rauschelbach, had a bright idea in taking over the vacant Houston’s space at 95th and Metcalf in Overland Park and turning it — with very little interior redecorating — into a satellite operation of the downtown Golden Ox. Newly installed golden plaques bearing the likeness of a noble steer may glitter, but all is not gold here. Still, there’s a lot of potential for success, once a few serious kinks get worked out.
Let’s start with the most basic facet of good service: cleanliness. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want my dinner served by a waiter whose hands look as if he just finished changing the oil in his Ford Bronco.
“Look at those dirty knuckles,” gasped my friend Bob as the waiter (who was perfectly friendly and attentive) walked away from the table. “And his fingernails!”
Perhaps because the servers here dress casually — T-shirts and black pants — and their serving style is completely informal, it’s acceptable to push the envelope of service traditions. My own waiter training was rigid in the enforcement of seemingly small details (spotless hands, no jewelry, starched shirt, pressed pants), so I cast a critical eye at this kid’s ensemble, which included more rings than Zsa Zsa Gabor ever wore at one time.
“I think the combination of grime and jewelry is very Freudian,” said my friend Martha, who immediately noticed that the dining room was still carpeted with the old floor covering from Houston’s. The signature Golden Ox carpet, woven with cattle brand marks, is “going to be installed soon,” we were told. The brick walls could use a few more of the original restaurant’s vintage stockyard photographs, too; the place still looks just like Houston’s, even with all those shiny new cow heads poking out here and there.
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The menu has been given a subtle Houston’s spin. In addition to all the traditional Golden Ox steak and seafood choices, there are now three specialty salads — including a pan-seared portabella mushroom concoction — and three pasta offerings. When the first flurry of press releases about the new restaurant were sent out in January, Rauschelbach announced that “Kansas City’s well-known chef J.J. Mirabile will consult on the menu.”
Mirabile’s input to the Golden Ox repertoire might have been interesting, but he didn’t work with Rauschelbach’s kitchen staff at all. (“I never even heard from him again,” Mirabile told me.) And it’s immediately evident that the marvelously talented executive chef at Jasper’s couldn’t have had a hand in creating the gloppy mess called salmon pasta, a bowl of bowtie noodles and chunks of sautéed salmon drenched in soupy dill cream sauce. It was ghastly — though it was accompanied by two wonderful slices of garlic toast that, unlike any I’ve had at the downtown Golden Ox, were actually served hot!
But that was also the meal at which the cheeseburger I ordered medium-rare arrived well-done, along with the slow-roasted New Zealand lamb chops that Martha ordered “chef’s choice” and still thought were too rare. I grabbed one of the enticing little chops and found it superbly juicy and expertly cooked, but Martha — who is clearly watching too much war coverage on TV — fretted that it was “too bloody” and had our accommodating (but untidy) server rush it back to the kitchen for a few more minutes in the oven.
Bob had daringly ordered one of the newer steak offerings, a 10-ounce strip grilled au poivre, with a crust of spicy peppercorns and a blanket of delectably rich blue-cheese sauce. It’s a classy and delicious updating of the good old Kansas City strip. Less rewarding was a side dish of Creamy Cheese Potatoes, which was greasy rather than creamy and a visual disaster, all clumped together with rubbery yellow cheese. I also wanted to taste the Arthur Bryant’s Baked Beans listed on the menu, but the server shrugged and said, “We don’t have them tonight. We didn’t have them last night, either.”
If that meal was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a second visit to the restaurant was more along the lines of How the West Was Won. The bright (and well-scrubbed) server kept his sense of humor intact dealing with our maddening group, which included 21-year-old Ashley, who ordered — then sheepishly sent back — a strawberry daiquiri because it had “too much liquor in it.” I wish I could have sent back the sinfully rich spinach-and-artichoke dip on the combination appetizer platter because it had too many calories in it, but I didn’t. We greedily spooned the stuff onto corn chips and even dipped the greasy, crispy onion rings into the bowl. The platter also featured oversized, chilled shrimp; tinny-tasting, chewy crab cakes; and “stuffed mushrooms” that weren’t stuffed at all but buried under a bubbling crust of crabmeat, chopped shrimp and parmesan cheese.
The salads — still served on chilled salad plates — are served at the new Ox with yeasty, warm breadsticks instead of crackers. There’s a daily soup offering, too, including Friday’s seafood chowder, made with lots of clams and a surprising amount of red pepper.
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Everyone ordered steak, and no one was disappointed. A hunk of fork-tender prime rib was sensually satisfying; a bacon-wrapped filet was almost silken in texture and came with shrimp prepared scampi-style, lolling in a pool of garlic butter; a pair of exquisitely juicy medallions of beef were topped with a swath of melted brie and a bordelaise sauce thick with chopped mushrooms.
The restaurant is still “experimenting” with the six desserts. (Only the crème brûlée — which tastes like vanilla pudding — is made on-site.) Although the servers seemed programmed to extol the virtues of the Golden Ox Brownie à la Mode, the sugary dish could have passed for a Little Debbie Snack Cake, and the scoop of à la mode couldn’t have been stingier. À la Miserable!
If the original Golden Ox still conjures up cowboys and ranchers, the new offshoot has a way to go to find its own identity. But given that the new place has set up camp on a street that already boasts two successful rival steak houses (J. Gilbert’s to the north, J. Alexander’s to the south), will the Golden Ox be able to wrangle a place in the sun? Absolutely. They brought along the bull from the original restaurant; now it just needs the balls.
