Restaurant review: Meat me for a steak

The Steakhouse at JW Marriott, tel 021 403 1010

Well, if you think that a steakhouse is nothing more than a restaurant serving steaks, let me disillusion you. For the steak market in Bucharest is the only restaurant sector in this wretched, Balkan, gastronomic desert of Romania which has grown and matured to an acceptable European standard.

Michael Barclay

To be fair, the market owes it all to the Intercontinental, who opened the first steakhouse eight years ago importing Argentinian beef. It was a first for the city, and it was so successful that soon the market was saturated with beef from Argentina and Brazil. But so what! Anything at that time was better than Romanian beef, which has improved so fabulously since those days that some Romanian beef is better than the South American import!

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So the era of Latino beef is over. The public is now too astute to accept that South American, bland, average and flavorless rubbish is of premium quality and savvy diners have now turned to genetics as the benchmark of quality rather than the country of export origin.

What that means is the breed of the beast on the menu, and nothing is better than the ‘Angus’ range of Scottish cattle. So proudly plod forward the Aberdeen Angus breed which comes in two flavors, namely Red Angus and Black Angus. The Americans adopted the Black Angus as their primary breeding stock because of its propensity to ‘marble’ its meat. That means there is a rich fat vein running through the meat which moisturizes the cut as it cooks.

So let’s see what The Marriott has achieved in its new steakhouse. It is a complete makeover. Everything, but everything you remember about the old Cupola restaurant is gone. Well, that is with the exception of the ‘Vatican Dome’ which they kept. They have taken a hell of a financial gamble by re-inventing the entire restaurant by means of a huge investment. And it shows!

You enter at the Champions end on the first floor, and walk through the bar which offers you over 100 fine wines. Most are affordable! On your left you pass a warm, relaxing cigar room, which offers you…cigars. This is a gift from heaven to American cigar lovers as they can purchase and puff away on their Cohibas without the hassle they have to go through to do the same back home.

Glide along a beautiful, rich, new parquet floor and through new glass partition doors to the open kitchen. And now it’s all showbiz, but performed tastefully. It is pure Americana, but they have selected the best of the USA and ignored the vulgar, mass market, McMuck style of US dining.

This means you will get courteous, happy and well informed waiting staff. But let’s eat. It is an American themed concept, which means they have American names attached to each dish, something I find irritating. But that is just me, because I love the English language. Americans have struggled with it throughout their entire history.

So there is a side dish of ‘Mac and Cheese’ and a dessert named ‘Whopee Pie and Milk Shake.’ This, to me, is baby language, but nobody feels silly in the USA talking like this. But the result of those two dishes is simply excellent, so the next time I go there I will order by pointing at the dishes on the menu, without naming them.

There is one exception to this principle, and that is their ‘Tomahawke Steak’. This is a wonderful rib-eye cut, which is presented to you with great humor. I will say no more, other than if you order it you will smile when it arrives at your table.

All of their steaks are grilled after sealing both sides to maintain and contain the steak’s moisture and juices.So they offer you a ‘Porterhouse’ which is really a ‘T-Bone’. If you try this, bear in mind that there are two cuts involved. On one side of the bone there is a fillet and on the other side there is a sirloin. Each has its own different flavor, so eat them separately.

Then we sampled a ‘Rib Eye, off the bone’. They depend on the marbling to cook the cut, and although it was great, I prefer steak on the bone, as the roasted bone gives the meat an added dimension. And now the American names began to kick in. That said, the steaks were perfect.So there is a ‘New York Strip’, a perfect fillet with a rich band of exterior fat in which to cook it. Then a Kansas City Strip’, an excellent strip loin cut resplendent with both bone and marble.

All of the produce is imported from the USA, which means you get big, big American sized portions. The steaks are aged for 21 days at 4 degrees before you get your teeth into them.This is both necessary and absolutely correct to tenderize the meat and to increase its flavor.

Side dishes are chosen with the same care as the meat. So look out for sauces and dips such as:Bourbon and Peppercorn, Béarnaise, Horseradish, and Port and Stilton. Anticipate hot buttery mini bread rolls cooked freshly in-house and served warm at your table. They also have all-year-around fresh green asparagus, which is as good as it gets.

But surprise, surprise; we are in a steakhouse, where the meat is excellent – but my overriding memory was the side dish of crab. Both as crab pieces and crab cakes. They tasted of crab, and that is another first for this city.

The House’s steakhouse concept has been imported intact from the group’s flagship hotel, Grosvenor House in London, where it is a success. If it is good enough for the discerning international diners of London, it has to be more than good enough for grubby Bucharest.

mab.media@dnt.ro