The renowned writer, historian and BBC broadcaster Andrew Marr was at the height of his intellectual career when he suffered a stroke at home in January 2013, at age 53. He has returned to some of his duties at BBC, but much of the energy and intellectual agility with which he made a name for himself is no longer there.
These and other thoughts of impending mortality hung heavy over us as we trooped up three flights of stairs to Elbert’s Steak Room for our last big meal of the holiday season before work, and before strict dietary regimes imposed themselves on us again the following Monday.
Sclerotics, paraplegics and the otherwise mobility-impaired need not apply; as many others have dryly observed, getting up the steep, narrow staircase is an apt, if necessary, workout before treating yourself to the slabs of soft cow awaiting you at the top.
It’s a mystery why there aren’t more steak rooms in the city. You’d think there’d be more, given how much we like our beef.
Perhaps it’s because almost every restaurant, no matter what it purports to be, offers some steak option, and many men, including myself, are too flummoxed or underwhelmed by the menu options and want something that would be sure to satisfy, or at least not leave one hungry.
I’m not being sexist here; really, it’s always men who are obsessed with steaks, or can have it every night until they keel over from a stroke.
Even if they can’t cook anything else and use every utensil in the kitchen to do it, most men will be able to grill a decent steak in their kitchens.
Men’s magazines rank this ability alongside the modern male’s basic survival skills such as shaving properly or doing a necktie. And I don’t entirely disagree.
But while it’s fairly easy to cook a decent steak, cooking a perfect steak requires plenty of time and effort, equal parts science and intuition.
Thus, there’s the need for the steak restaurant, given that the best of us can’t cook steaks as well as someone who does several hundreds of them every week, every night. And even with a cast iron grill on a 5 kilowatt induction cooker, home cooks cannot replicate the ferocious heat a steak house’s professional Southbend broiler can produce. (For those interested in the math, one watt of a high-efficiency induction cooker translates to about 3.4 BTU. A small Southbend broiler, the standard in the industry, fires at about 110,000 BTU.)
And finally, it’s simply nice to have a stress-free night and leave someone else to worry about the grading and the cooking of one’s beef.
Intimate, discreet
The “Elbert” of Elbert’s Steak Room is Elbert Cuenca, who also owns Ramen Yushoken in Alabang. He is known for his lifestyle of fast cars and high living.
I was quite surprised to find his eponymous steak room smaller and more intimate than I had imagined, full of discreet little nooks and crannies, not a theatrical open space and not too many tables—my favorite size for a restaurant, actually.
Here the lighting is soft, the crystal stemware sparkles, and the prices, well, are commensurately high. But you do get what you pay for.
I’m not privy to the process that Mr. Cuenca (or his chef) uses to deliver the plates of char-grilled goodness that my wife and I celebrated a friend’s birthday with the other night (the restaurant’s Facebook page does show a Southbend broiler). The medium-rare, as the waiter suggested, came as medium-rare, with the outside well-seared but without any of the annoying gray strip of meat at the top and bottom of the cross-section.
The béarnaise sauce was a bit more cheesy than I would have wanted (a bit of water or lemon juice just before serving helps to loosen it a bit), but otherwise there was little else I could fault about our meal, apart from a bit of exposed wiring in the toilet that really shouldn’t be there in a high-end restaurant.
The meat showed absolutely no signs of having been defrosted hastily, as steaks usually are in places that have them as token items. Lovers of the fattier rib section and of the more tender loin sections are catered to equally, with the “extra prime” grade adding a kick to the arteries, as well as to the bill.
I know I’m somewhat late to the party on this one, but I found it an overall excellent dining experience.
It’s not usually within the remit of this space to cover food outside of restaurants, but one of the best roast beef meals I had over the holidays was ordered from a caterer.
Monchot Ongsiako delivers some of the best roast prime rib around; I’m not sure if it’s a sous vide assisted roast or a very well-executed low-heat roast, but this was one of the juiciest cuts I’ve had, with not a hint of coarseness even toward the inside (the “bottom” of the cross-section, on the opposite side from the lip).
The bad news is that the portions are for about 20 to 25 persons, which is more than the number of friends I have to invite over.
But with the ones I have, I’m just glad that we survived the holiday season with our minds and bodies fully functioning, at least, for the moment.
Elbert’s Steak Room is at Sagittarius Bldg., HV de la Costa St., Makati; tel. 3393963
Monchot’s Fine Foods, tel. 5125180