Steak served with a legacy

BACK in the ‘80s, when chefs wouldn’t serve you a steak unless they could cut it up and drizzle it with raspberry coulis, I joined a club for lovers of old-fashioned American beefsteak. In fact, I got myself named sergeant-at-arms and craftily wrote up bylaws that granted sweeping powers to the sergeant-at-arms.

After a number of fine steak dinners, though, one of our officers married a vegetarian, and meetings tapered off. Reluctantly, I gave up my dream of world dominion by means of retro steak club.

It turns out we Bloodhounds were as much ahead of the times as behind them. In the last few years, several high-end restaurants have spawned steakhouses. It only proves one thing: What goes around comes around, medium rare.

Patrick Terrail, owner of the once-famous Ma Maison, was prophesying a return to steak and potatoes in 1986. “We’ve been California-ed out,” he said. As it happened, we didn’t actually get California-ed out until five years later, when the economy went over a big cliff, and the next thing turned out to be a seven-year binge on Italian food.

Now, steak has finally returned. Somehow, though, a number of old-line steakhouses have been here all along, weathering every new thing since before Julia Child, to say nothing of relentless onslaughts by nutritionists and vegetarians. Decade in and decade out, they’ve kept a loyal clientele, and without the financial resources of the recent wave of corporate steakhouses. What secrets do these ancients possess?

For one thing, they have a welcoming air -- they’ve ignored all the edgy elements that started creeping into restaurants 20 years ago. They have no little spotlights on wires, no ceilings full of exposed air ducts, no throbbing noise level. If there are paintings on the wall, they’re not avant-garde and not for sale (not that you’d be interested, probably).

Above all, there’s no self-consciousness about the menu. They offer a comfortable carnivorous evening in a plush imitation-leather booth at the hands of people who know how to handle a solid chunk of meat.

Other than that, there are a few common tokens of age. Many of these places maintain the custom of making their own steak sauce, usually in the same basic style as A-1. Most serve garlic cheese bread, generally sopping with butter. Baked potatoes often come with sour cream and green onions, since chives weren’t so common 50 years ago, and green onions have become a house tradition.

Finally, some item on the menu is always “world-famous.” You don’t outlast the decades if you can’t get “world-famous” for your onion rings, at the very least.

Filet mignon, by a nose

Surprisingly often, there’s a connection with horse racing. Something about the ponies just puts you in the mood for cow, especially when you’ve just had a win.

The Derby, opened in 1922 by a jockey, is the second-oldest steakhouse in the Southland, right after downtown’s Pacific Dining Car. Santa Anita Park is only five blocks west, and the Derby is saturated with racing memorabilia, from the antique posters in the dining rooms to a sort of racetrack museum at the entrance.

It’s a sprawling, brick-walled place with complimentary valet parking, gleaming red-leather booths and a dress code engraved at its entrance: country club casual. It does fill up after the last race of the day, but it’s also a local businessmen’s favorite. One of its specialties is the most garlicky garlic cheese toast in town -- Parmesan-topped bread toasted and then doused with plenty of chopped garlic browned in butter.

The specialty steak, “the steak that made the Derby famous” is a sizable filet mignon wrapped in bacon. It comes with giant onion rings, a potato and side dishes such as Asian coleslaw (that’s with raisins and almonds). There are a couple of steak sauces on the table, but the waiter is likely to recommend ignoring them. He’s right, this is a lovely steak -- tender, juicy and flavorful -- that needs no sauce.

Clearman’s Steak ‘n Stein Inn belongs to the generation of steakhouses that sprang up right after World War II. Uniquely for a luxury steakhouse, this imposing place in a nondescript corner of Pico Rivera takes no reservations, and almost half the floor space is taken up by a huge lounge lighted by red lanterns, where you wait along with everybody else on ranks of couches arranged concentrically around a copper-hooded fireplace.

You get a lot of tableside service once you’re seated, from the flourish with which the waiter dishes up your salad to the dramatic moment when he flames your steak. That’s right, the steak is already cooked, but he also flames it briefly before transferring it to your plate, alongside a gigantic baked potato he has already wrestled apart in your presence. With all this production, it’s no wonder a lot of the customers get to know the waiters by name.

Both salad and potato come with three toppings to play with: blue cheese, sour cream and a tomato-y vinaigrette for the former, sour cream (with some blue cheese), green onions and a rich, semiliquid mixture of cheese and butter for the latter. You also get a classical garlic cheese bread, probably the best one around, and a pot of the house steak sauce, which is heavy on the clove flavor.

With their dark wood and massive modeling, the dining rooms make quiet allusions to a European hunting lodge.

The Valley Inn, opened in 1947, has more subdued hints of a turn-of-the-century style. As you enter its bar, you might notice that you’re actually passing through swinging doors. It’s a very appealing bar, by the way, dark and snug and a million miles from the world.

The restaurant’s location on an obscure north-south street that dead-ends at Ventura Boulevard has made it a sort of hangout for the Valley’s Industry people. The foyer and the smaller of the two dining rooms are well-plastered with 8-by-10s of show-biz customers from over the years, including Annette Funicello. The larger room has black booths and an arresting rose-red color scheme that extends to its low ceiling.

Two of the Valley Inn’s world-famous specialties come automatically with the steak sandwich (a tender, flavorful New York cut). Those would be a garlic bread with a layer of crumbly toasted Parmesan on top and the oily, irresistible “frizzled” onions -- skinny rings in a thin, crunchy breading.

In 1947, one owner of a Pasadena steakhouse named Perry’s bought out his partner and changed the name to Monty’s. It’s still there. From the exterior, which could use a lick of paint, you might think it’s a fading institution. In fact, it’s quite snazzy inside, and still popular with sports fans and college students. It belongs to the shiny-red-booth persuasion, and its walls are decorated with big antique mirrors advertising beer or whiskey.

The menu lists some modern-sounding specials, such as roasted beets with goat cheese, but steak is still the heart of it. Very good steak too. Regulars say that if they don’t finish a steak, the house offers to take it off the bill. The house steak sauce is better described as a sweet pepper relish, odd at first but not bizarre. Some would say the world-famous specialty at Monty’s is creamed spinach.

“Tex” Taylor started Taylor’s Prime Steaks as Taylor’s Tavern in 1953; he was a horse breeder, among other things, and the original menu cover showed a field of racehorses rounding into the stretch.

Things change slowly at Taylor’s. When I first went there 25 years ago, the waitresses all seemed to be big-boned, gruffly maternal gals of a certain age. Years later, some of them had retired, to be replaced by gruffly maternal Latinas. These days the staff is more varied (I’ve seen a young, non-gruff waitress), but there’s still a brusque, homey Texas note to the place, for all the dark wood, red and black booths and oil paintings.

One of those waitresses must have been the legendary Molly, inventor of the house special salad: a chunk of iceberg lettuce topped with diced tomatoes and onions and big chunks of blue cheese, doused with a mixture of Italian and blue cheese dressings. There’s practically no point in going to Taylor’s without ordering a Molly salad.

The special steak is the culotte, a tender cut of top sirloin; tasty, though certainly chewier than filet. There’s also a half culotte if you aren’t up to a whole one. Taylor’s doesn’t hold with putting sauce on steak.

Tableside drama

In 1958, when the Dal Rae -- named after a racehorse -- was opened, only about three miles from the Steak ‘n Stein, new ideas about restaurant design were stirring. The new restaurant’s facade was done in the ‘50s favorite material, fieldstone. Instead of being low and cozy, the ceiling was high and even slightly peaked, giving the huge dining room a sort of dramatic grandeur that the older steakhouses never attempted. Eating in one of the Dal Rae’s black booths is a little like eating on stage; it’s the big night out in the neighborhood, though the crowd isn’t particularly dressy.

Naturally, there’s plenty of tableside service, such as flamed desserts. The Caesar salad specialist has mixed up thousands of Caesar dressings, complete with mashed anchovies, raw egg yolk and the dusty sort of ground Parmesan that was always traditional around here; he could do it in his sleep, he says, and you believe him. They bring you a chilled salad fork when your salad has been tossed and served.

The famous steak here is what the Dal Rae calls a pepper steak, but the pepper in question is chopped bell pepper and the dominant flavor in the topping is crumbled bacon; the Dal Rae uses very good meat, but it’s a little hard to tell with all this stuff on it. If you want a French-style pepper steak, that’s steak au poivre, and it’s very good with its sauce of thickened meat juices and peppercorns.

Trabuco Oaks Steakhouse is an oddity, maybe because it opened in the contrarian ‘60s (the year was 1968). Orange County is known for its love of the beach and its devotion to grandiose restaurant architecture, but the county’s most venerable steakhouse is way up in the hills, and its decor is closer to Dogpatch than Las Vegas. This might have been the restaurant that started the cute custom of snipping the necktie off anybody who walks in wearing one. The back dining room is a morgue of martyred neckties, hanging from the rafters in their thousands like rumpled, bravely colorful stalactites, speaking mutely of the changing necktie styles of decades past.

It all works out to a kind of Old West theme, with denim place mats and cuminy cowboy beans. All the cooking is done on mesquite, so you have to make a reservation -- if business is slow, they let the fire go out, and then there’s no accommodating dropper-inners. The basics are all here: garlic toast, baked potato with sour cream and even a house steak sauce -- in this case something like a cross between steak sauce and barbecue sauce.

That’s what it’s about: the basics. Nobody ever says, “I’m in the mood for raspberry coulis.”