High Steaks
What's a nice grille doing in a place like this?
If Seattle’s time-honored Second Avenue steakhouse, Metropolitan Grill, is the clubby bankers’ vault, Capital Grille is the aristocrat’s drawing room—and staffed by a leggy fleet of hosts and more waiters and busers and, apparently, midlevel managers than any establishment I’ve ever patronized.
Past tables and tables of fat cats and big dogs, to the strains of Sinatra and Bublé crooning standards, we were led to our white-napped booth, where our napkins were snapped and draped upon our laps, and, in time, our flatware adjusted to reflect our orders. Mine: the 24-ounce dry-aged porterhouse. My companion’s: the Kona-coffee-crusted dry-aged sirloin with caramelized shallot butter.
Five members of the Fleet marched the food out to our table in a choreographed line worthy of Busby Berkeley, and the minute I slid my knife into my porterhouse I could tell the dry-aged difference. It held a denser, almost grainlike texture, which John Martin told me occurs because the dry-aging process draws moisture from meat, leaving its enzymes to deeply tenderize the muscle. Removing the water also enhances the beefy flavor, the way a reduction sauce deepens as the water cooks away. (Wet-aging, by contrast, is usually done in a vacuum-packed bag, enhancing the texture but not the flavor.) The meat at Capital Grille is dry-aged two weeks in a climate-controlled cooler in the restaurant basement, rendering it, if not the only dry-aged in town (see the Metropolitan Grill, Daniel’s Broiler, El Gaucho, even JaK’s Grill), at least the only one dry-aged on-premise.
And it’s great, if you go in for that kind of thing: the sirloin a masterpiece of flavor (enhanced by its coffee crust and piquant butter), the porterhouse a manful portion of Real Meat. I may be the sole carnivore in Christendom who prefers the texture God gave a cow—variable in its consistencies, a little sinewy here, a little unctuous there. But the Grille deals in regular meat too, notably, a top-notch filet mignon sliced thickly and served in a figgy caramelized sauce with cipollini onions and three varieties of wild mushroom.
Past tables and tables of fat cats and big dogs, to the strains of Sinatra and Bublé crooning the standards, we were led to our white-napped booth.
And the Grille, in the way of steakhouses everywhere, embellishes with all the usual suspects: seafood (an impressive piece of king salmon, since fish, like a steak, is so much about the cooking); salads made with bacon (one a wedge of iceberg lettuce lavished in creamy blue cheese and scattered with bacon, another spinach with warm bacon dressing—both exceptional); and rich sides (a cone of grana truffle fries, a salty but sumptuous potatoes au gratin, greaseless panko onion rings). Appetizers and desserts both merit special shout-outs, each deserving of entire visits in their honor. Aim for the meaty lobster–Dungeness crab cakes with corn salad or the prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella before dinner; the double-chocolate-mint ice cream sandwich or extraordinary vanilla cheesecake after. A tip of the toque to line cook and pastry maestro Hollis Irving, a prodigious talent whom I would follow anywhere—even to the 33rd Capital Grille, which opened last month in (but of course) Palm Beach, Florida. There, I’m sure, one can find a similar decorative opulence, a similarly meaty menu, a similarly vast serving staff managing to convey “overtrained” and “underinformed” in a single sweep of the crumb scoop.
But that property won’t, however, inhabit a landmark Seattle building, or offer a wine list heavy on Northwest labels, or showcase quite the same portraits—there’s Jimi Hendrix, Bertha Knight Landes, Eddie Bauer—in its gilded frames. Make no mistake. For local authenticity, Capital Grille is no Met Grill or Daniel’s—but neither is it a generic franchise like Ruth’s Chris or Morton’s. It dwells somewhere in between, in that happy land where your steak is like butter and there’s bacon in your salad, and hey—who was Bertha Knight Landes anyway?
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Published: June 2008
