One of the perks that goes with wine writing is that I get to eat at a lot of restaurants that I would not normally eat at. Which is how I ended up at Nick & Sam’s, the uptown steakhouse.
The resurgence of the steakhouse in our dietary-enlightened era has always surprised me. Even small children know that it’s not a good idea to regularly eat huge slabs of red meat, yet steakhouses are thriving. On the Thursday night I was there, Nick & Sam’s was jam action packed. When I left at 9, people were still arriving, and you don’t often see that at a restaurant in Dallas.
So how did the huge slabs of red meat taste? Good, but considering the price (one person, with a couple of glasses of wine, can easily drop $100), good should be the minimum. It was certainly no better than Bern’s Steakhouse in Tampa, which is probably the best steakhouse I have eaten at.
I was, as I was walking out past the crowded tables, a bit puzzled by the buzz. Is there something about Dallas that attracts diners to very expensive restaurants, even if the dishes are just OK? The critic in Dallas’ Only Newspaper noted this, too: "And the food, which doesn’t quite reach the heights of the service but delivers soundly on the chophouse essentials, apparently keeps those regulars in jolly spirits."
Such are the metaphysics of the restaurant business in Dallas.
