Cow Palace

To get to Trabuco Oaks Steak House, you zoom up El Toro Road into a landscape of rolling hills and cookie-cutter housing tracts, screech right at a Harley-infested tavern, wind on past thistle fields and shady live-oak bowers, dusty hillsides and a dry stream bed to what seems like the east side of the moon, if the moon smelled like woods moke and had a gravel parking lot filled with late-model cars. The place has survived fires, minor political fracases and a policy, cheerfully ripped off from Tucson’s famous Pinnacle Peak, of cutting the necktie off anybody who dares to wear one into the restaurant.

“Watch out,” says the manager as he scissors through a nice-looking red silk rep. “I haven’t hurt anybody yet, but you never know.”

Trabuco Oaks is probably the most famous steakhouse in Orange County, a politicians’ dive where you’re likely to overhear gossip on the Republican primaries for just about any office; a haunt for groups of businessmen who drive up from Newport Beach and Irvine to eat great slabs of cow and have their ties amputated. Richard Nixon used to like the place, a fact reported in a fair number of his obituaries: His severed tie is preserved under glass next to Bebe Rebozo’s in sort of a presidential shrine near the door. A minute or two from good hiking trails, just down the road from a posh resort, Trabuco Oaks is a good destination for a weekend road trip--but don’t forget to reserve, or you’ll wait for hours.

It’s a pretty incredible sight, the back dining room of Trabuco Oaks, a sort of ramshackle wooden thing with trees growing through the roof, forests of business cards stapled to the walls, and necktie corpses hanging from the low ceiling like so many floppy stalactites. After a couple of the place’s strong bourbon-and-sodas, you may feel as if you have been swallowed by a vast, multicolored beast.

A mural flanking the parking lot announces something called the Chicken Lips Coffee Club, but the chicken at Trabuco Oaks is pretty ordinary, either battered and fried into dryness or skewered and grilled into wood.

There may be a Ramrod, a Cowgirl and a L’il Wrangler, but the currency at Trabuco Oaks is the two-pound Cowboy Steak, a truly serious piece of meat. This hillock of steer is the size of a small Alp, crusted black over a wood fire and bleeding rare if you order it that way, fibrous and mineral-rich, by far the best steak in the house. It is also so much thicker than the steaks you’re used to seeing that it seems almost ridiculous on its sizzling metal platter, like a top sirloin that Fred Flintstone might eat, though two people will put a bigger dent in it than you may think.

With the Cowboy Steak--with practically anything here--come giant heaps of excellent thin-cut fries, a ramekin of smoky charro beans, a few slices of white-bread garlic toast and a green salad with Italian dressing that may remind you of the salads at your junior high cafeteria. There are also, as pretty much the only appetizers here, the cheese-topped skillets full of sauteed zucchini and mushrooms that you may have considered sophisticated dinner party food when you moved into your first college apartment.

Dessert is something called a Cherry Gizmo, sort of a deep-fried burrito stuffed with cherry-pie filling instead of beans, topped with whipped cream and a curl of soft-serve frozen custard, and served on a bed of more cherry-pie filling . . . perhaps the least subtle dessert since the Twinkie, but strangely suitable to an overblown steak meal.

Trabuco Oaks Steak House

20782 Trabuco Oaks Drive, Trabuco Canyon, (714) 586-0722. (405 Freeway to El Toro Road, east eight miles to Cook’s Corner, right four miles to sign for restaurant.) Open Monday-Friday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 4 to 10 p.m. Full bar. Lot parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Reservations suggested, essential on weekends. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$35.