Chicago Chop House

This is a Chicago steakhouse with proponents and detractors and has been discussed on this and other boards. I count myself a fan; the aged beef and preparation of same is outstanding and I've always had good service (though I don't discount the reports of those who have been unhappy with their service, it just hasn't happened to me).

Anyway once I became aware that 3/15 was the 6th International Eat an Animal for PETA day http://www.yourish.com/archives/2005/ma ... 2005030803 I rallied some friends who are always up for a good cause and a reservation was made for noon. And then my boss moved my normal meeting with him to noon. Grrrr. Reservation adjustments were made for 1 PM and life was good again.

Our goal was to contribute to this noble cause as best we could and celebrate a sort of "Silence of the cows". Martinis and oysters to start. The Belvidere up extra dry with blue cheese olives was expertly done and the oysters were serviceable though not in the same league as what one gets at Shaws. They were a sizeable step up, though, over what we had eaten at Smith & Wollensky's the previous week (wine week). On that day we theorized that the shucking station at S&W had a big sign with instructions:
1) Under no circumstances rinse or in any way clean the exterior of the shells
2) Gather all the oysters into a large bucket to prepare for shucking
3) Fire a shotgun into the barrel repeatedly until enough oyster matter has been exposed to scoop up and deposit onto a plate.

Seriously it was bizarre - one couldn't handle an oyster without having to soil a napkin immediately after and the oysters looked as if "Chucky" had been practicing for an upcoming sequel. The fact that the oysters still tasted quite good was marred by the presence of a number of shell chunks but luckily dental demolition derby was avoided.

But I digress, enough about S&W and back to the Chop House.

Knowing that red meat was the order of the day we ordered some Cabernet, specifically the 2001 Fiddlehead Fiddlestix. It's a bit muted right out of the bottle but once allowed to open up it really paired up well. Chop House has an extensive wine list that provides a wide array of wines and price points to choose from.

All of our orders came with the house salad, a better than average collection of lettuce, cucumber, onions, and pretty good tomatoes for the season. Most of us had the blue cheese dressing which, like most things here, is applied in healthy quantity.



Although it was a lunch a number of us ordered from the dinner menu as we each have our preferred cuts. My particular favorite is the Chop House "signature" dish, the 24 oz. bone-in prime rib prepared like a steak. The meat is roasted as per normal but just as it's ready it's sliced off, seasoned and seared like a steak. So there's the rich, full, smoothness of good prime rib but the exterior firmness and char from a great steak. It was ordered medium rare and delivered exactly so. I'm out of training so I failed to gnaw the remnants off the bone but I did eat all of that which is easily handled with knife and fork. It was as excellent as ever (one of my dining companions also had this as it's his fave, too).

The rest of the party had:
bone-in NY strip (24 oz)
boneless NY strip (16 oz)
Porterhouse (48 oz)
Surf & Turf (lobster tail & filet)

Each of the entrees also came with potato and most of us opted for the potato pancakes (2 per order): Shredded Potato Blended with Eggs, Onions, Ryser's Bros. Bread Crumbs, Salt, Black Pepper. Served with Sour Cream & Applesauce.

I like the fact that the Chop House includes salad and potato with the entrees as opposed to the traditional steak house method of absolutely everything being a la carte.

For the table to share there were a couple orders of creamed spinach (quite good, with chopped hardboiled egg as garnish) and sauteed mushrooms. It was all good.

To finish, I split a turtle cheesecake with a friend and someone else had the carrot cake - everyone else was too full. Not too full, however, to not have a nice glass of port. These were very generous pours, too, and put a nice end to a nice meal (40 yr tawny's). I thought it was a nice touch that the cheesecake was split in the kitchen and brought out on two plates (we had said he and I are going to split) rather than just the one plate with two forks that one sometimes sees.

Fortunately John Cleese did not show up in a tuxedo and coax us to try a wafer thin mint as we were all quite vulnerable at that point. All in all it was (for us) another terrific meal at CCH and a great couple of hours spent with good friends.

All of the following pictures can be clicked upon to zoom to larger size if so desired, but are posted in miniature here out of consideration to bandwidth variability of readers as well as I'm just too damn lazy to do the resizing to avoid skewing the window size. OK, you caught me - it's really mostly the lazy thing.

Bone-in Prime Rib


Porterhouse


Bone-in NY Strip


Boneless NY Strip (just a 16 oz for the young lad in the group)


Surf & Turf

thanks kman. the prime rib and bone-in strip look particularly good.

Yes, the bone-in strip was my friend directly to my right and it looked very good in person. If it weren't for the prime-rib special dish that's what I'd probably order. I'm still a n00b at food foto's and need to get better at finding a way to accomodate the bright white background (tablecloths and plates) of the places I shoot these in. I'm just running in the idiot-mode point and shoot of my Canon S400 and it's helping this idiot out pretty well but I know from the G Wiv's and Erik M's there's a whole 'nuther league of food porn to which I aspire.

Best advice for food photos: if the plate is decently lit, don't use the flash. It creates that terrible glare on the white plates and often on the food itself.

Also, I like to take 5-6 photos in quick succession of whatever I'm looking at. one of them is pretty much guaranteed to be in focus and at the right angle and such, regardless of any hand tremor.