Setting Your Steaks

From the Food Vault Dept.: Mention of our steakhouse meal on board the Queen Mary 2 set me to recalling some of the places in that category that I’ve reviewed over the years. I have a fondness for the The Barnsider in Albany, NY, although I haven’t been there in a long time. Probably worth a revisit now, especially because I can visit as a civilian. Which is also to say that it’s still in business, now with affiliated units in Massachusetts: The Hardcover in Danvers, and Beverly’s The Beverly Depot. (Photos are courtesy The Barnsider.)

                                                                                            

SURE, IT SEEMS LIKE the Barnsider always has been there, but the fact that the place has been going strong for over 40 years still seems somehow shocking. Forty years? A steakhouse?

That’s probably one of the keys to its success. It offers, and always has offered, a menu that’s compelling in its reliability. In a market that is notoriously averse to culinary innovation, the Barnsider is more conservative still. Steaks, seafood, salad bar.

Another key: terrific service. It’s easy to argue that steaks are steaks, so there needs to be an extra touch to keep the customers coming back. The Barnsider does it nicely.

When I last wrote about the place, in 1994, I complained that the filet mignon was a pricey $19. Today it’s $23. And pricing on the rest of the menu is consistent with what you’ll find in other area steakhouses; in fact, compared to some of the better ones, the Barnsider is a bargain.

And there’s a secret bargain it offers: a birthday boy or girl gets a 50 percent discount on that special day. You can even have the birthday kid serenaded, something we witnessed a few times during our visits.

It’s not a place that crackles with ambiance. More than likely, you’ll be seated, as we were, in the cavernous main dining room – yet it doesn’t feel like so many people are splayed around you. I studied the room to figure out the secret, but I haven’t cracked the mystery. It could be the large tables and very comfortable chairs; certainly the high ceiling helps diffuse surrounding chatter.

Unless you’re in a party of five or more, reservations aren’t available. Early on a weeknight we were seated immediately; a weekend visit necessitated a brief wait. Once you’re seated, however, the show begins. You’re taken in hand.

“Our servers work in teams of three,” says general manager Michelle Hughes, who has served in several different capacities at the place for many years. “It’s a system that we’ve used here since the beginning, and it works very well for us.”

The beginning, by the way, was at Colonie Center for the restaurant’s first 20 years. It moved – around the time of its only change of ownership – to the former Victoria Station on Sand Creek Rd., not too far from its former location.

Hughes explained that all of the food is prepared in house; furthermore, the steaks are dry-aged on the premises for at least three weeks, after which they’re broken down and trimmed in the Barnsider’s own butcher shop.

Such attention shows. “It’s as good a steak as I’ve ever tasted,” said Gary, a fellow actor. He was commenting on the meat that makes up the steak au poivre ($24), a cut of sirloin cooked exactly to his specification. The au poivre part, however, was far less peppery than we expected: typically, the meat has cracked peppercorns pounded into its surface; here, it’s a light dusting of pepper.

I checked my old review after fact and found myself complaining of the same thing, so both the restaurant and I remain consistent, and it’s clearly a house style that popular with the customers. The sauce, which is thick and suitably rich, also contains nothing too peppery for your parents.

Other steaks range from top sirloin ($19) to a 28-oz. sirloin for two ($38), with cuts of tenderloin and even a teriyaki sirloin ($20) among them. I sampled the New York sirloin ($27 for a 23-ounce cut) during one visit and found it an excellent cut, conservatively cooked – but I like to smear the steaks I grill with wasabi butter.

Seafood dishes include baked stuffed shrimp ($20), tomato basil salmon ($20), baked haddock ($19), crab-stuffed scrod ($22) and more; in the chicken realm, there’s a teriyaki-seasoned pound of breast ($18.50) and the item that overwhelmed my wife: chicken Florentine ($19.50).

Two breasts are stuffed with spinach and cheese, then wrapped in puff pastry before baking. It looked so good and was browned so nicely that she was convinced it came from elsewhere, already prepared, but Hughes assured me otherwise.

I also sampled the rack of lamb ($25), which gets a crunch from a coating of herbs and served in its juice with a hint of mint. Excellent – even a little too much – for a lamb lover like me.

Unnecessarily, I started with a special appetizer of escargot ($10), cooked and served in little pastry jackets surrounded by garlic butter. The snails were tender; the combo was good.

But there’s a robust salad bar that awaits with every entrée order! It doesn’t go too crazy with auxiliary salads, but the basics are there, and they’re fresh, and there are a few loaves of bread for you to slice and a Matterhorn of cheddar from which to extract slices. You’ll easily fill up on this stuff, which explains the number of take-home containers we saw.

It’s easy to forget that this reliable gem of an eatery is tucked to one side of Wolf Rd., but it’s worth a visit when your appetite is stoked and you want to avoid the chain restaurants that otherwise throng the area. Here’s a sound reminder that it’s possible to be local and better.
 
(Current info:) The Barnsider, 480 Sand Creek Road, Colonie, 518-869-2448, barnsiderrestraurant.com. A sixty-year-old success presenting matchless, home-butchered steaks as well as seafood and other meatstuffs, and big, bustling salad bar to boot. Serving dinner Mon-Thu 4-9, Fri-Sat 4-10:00, Sun 4-9. All major cards.

– Metroland Magazine, 9 February 2006

                                                                             

Bonus! My review of the same place from a dozen years earlier.

CAN FINE DINING and the steakhouse phenomenon overlap? It’s a difficult combination because beef, when you get right down to it, is boring. And it’s not all that easy to eat. Think of the tricky business of making it fit to consume: unless you’re slicing off the shell for sirloin or off the tenderloin for filet mignon, you need to cajole the meat into tenderness. Fast-food steakhouses like Ponderosa resort to piercing cheap cuts of meat with thousands of tiny needles, and there are powerful marinades available to break down the musculature.

Still, “steak” has long been synonymous with high-toned eating. As a teenager, I treasured trips to my town’s newest steakhouse, where leather-aproned waiters recited a list of beefy entrees and pointed us toward the salad bar, promising that “I won’t tell them to put your steak on the grill until I see you go up for salad.” He made it seem as if he were doting on us. 

Even as we discover just how bad beef is for us and how tasty the alternatives can be, people continue to throng to the steakhouses. The better places offer good cuts of sirloin and filet, and all of them serve the polyester suit of steak consumption, prime rib. What sets the Barnsider apart is a better-than-average partying atmosphere. The old-fashioned steakhouse is churchlike in its reverential attitude toward meat consumption; here, at least, there’s a sense of fun.

The two ways of making money off of this venture are to attract a lot of people and charge them heartily, and the Barnsider does both. Its first 20 years were spent in Colonie Center, which no longer makes any pretense toward fine dining; now the Barnsider inhabits the home of the former Victoria Station, replacing the railroad motif with a more neutral look punctuated by eccentric portraiture – a giant praying mantis dominated the room where I sat; a plucked chicken scowled from the wall in another.

Three of us arrived unannounced early on a recent Wednesday evening, and we still had a half-hour wait for a table. That’s how busy it gets. An outdoor deck was filled, and the bar, where we waited, was also doing a good business – helped by the special cooking area there that puts out light menu fare.

We were summoned to and seated in the main dining room, at a comfortably roomy table, where we wrestled with menu choices. I’ll confess: the assault on my senses was irresistible, and something Proustian kicked in. I ordered a filet mignon. It’s a pricey $19 – the surf ‘n turf combo is up there in the twenties – and includes some manner of starch and the ubiquitous salad bar.

The salad bar, which we dutifully visited, had no surprises.

For an appetizer, I went for the stuffed mushroom special. What arrived was a plate of handsome looking, high-calorie crab-stuffed caps, which wasn’t what I ordered. And the waiter was there immediately to whisk it away, replacing it with a sorrier-looking plate. Which, as I recalled, was supposed to be Béarnaise-topped. “That’s right,” confirmed a passing waitress, who returned it to the line to be corrected. “Don’t know how they could have forgotten that,” she said. I do: it wasn’t a very interesting appetizer to begin with. The sauce could be justifiably forgotten with a zestier spinach preparation.

Sharon and Al both started with soup – in fact, both started with the same soup although they ordered different ones. Sharon’s fish chowder was too watery to justify the chowder designation, while Al’s Creole vegetable, when it arrived, lacked the bite that a Creole designation suggests.

To be fair, I don’t get too upset about order mix-ups as long as they’re corrected quickly. I’ve just never seen so many pile up so quickly. Al’s steak au poivre, a dish traditionally prepared tableside, had a light dusting of pepper and no sauce. That is, no sauce at first – it was eventually delivered, but it lacked the liveliness of a freshly-made version where the brandy’s still potent.

The sirloin was good, cooked medium rare (Al’s concession to my bluster about how meat should be prepared) with a firm outside; my filet was cooked rare but had a char-broiled outside. It was served with a side of Béarnaise, fast turning into my sauce of the night.

Sharon chose a stuffed filet of sole for her entree, with a textbook crabmeat filling. And that’s probably the defining factor of the Barnsider: you won’t find surprises here. Service is swift and has the advantage of placing several servers in a particular area, so you can usually get someone’s attention.

Back in its Colonie Center days, this was known as the birthday party place, and they still send out a quartet of staffers to serenade the victim – but where’s the close harmony I’d heard so much about?

Dinner for three, with tax and tip, desserts and a bottle of wine, was $120. But we went through a lot of food.

– Metroland Magazine, 23 June 1994