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Carnal Knowledge — Page 2
ReStill with me? Because things are going to get bloody.
We’re celebrating the return of carnivorousness
here. I don’t like my meat with a dollop of conscience.
(Though the organic, grass-fed, and presumably more
humane beef that shows up in the Pinkys 12-ounce rib
eye and steak tartare is delicious.) I am unapologetically
happy atop the food chain. If you don’t feel the
same way, put the magazine down, back away, and go gather
nuts and berries, or whatever you vegetarian folks do
for a good time.
“Meat is the ultimate symbol of North American
affluence,” writes Susan Bourette in Carnivore
Chic, published by Penguin this month. Which goes a
long way toward explaining the current steakhouse boomlet
in Vancouver. Steak’s decadence is not just financial:
“It’s about indulgence,” says Browns
president Scott Morison, who is currently opening a
second Pinkys in Kits. Scanning the pretty, young, expensively
denimed crowd, he adds, “They work all week, they
go to the gym every night—and on Thursday they
want steak.”
Bourette’s book supports the theory that human
history has been driven by the need to secure a steady
supply of protein: “meat hunger,” as anthropologist
Marvin Harris calls it. “Meat sweats” is
what I call the condition I’m in a few nights
later at Morton’s, the Vancouver outpost of a
78-strong international chain and the only local beefery
serving USDA Prime (the top two percent of all North
American cattle—fattier and theoretically tastier
than Canadian Prime). My Chicago cut bone-in rib steak,
24 ounces and easily two inches thick, with the bone
exposed, looks like a Fred Flintstone-size drumstick.
This meat, from the less worked muscles inside the cow’s
rib cage, is the king of steaks for its intense marbling
of fat. The melting fat cooks back into the meat on
Morton’s red-hot vertical broilers and gives it
its intense flavour and buttery texture.
My companion’s 24-ounce medium-rare porterhouse
is soft and juicy on the tenderloin side of the bone,
deeply nutty-tasting on the strip-loin side. “That’s
what marks USDA as a distinct product—the specific
flavour profile of each cut,” executive chef Lee
Milton tells me on the phone the next day. “Being
a Canadian, it’s a tough thing to say, but USDA
Prime is the best.” And tough for an Alberta girl
to admit, too, but he just might be—for $57, he
better be—right.
I’ve eaten in the Chicago and Miami Morton’s
and could swear I’m back there. The food porn
of plastic-wrapped raw steaks, melon-sized potatoes,
and gigantic asparagus stalks is paraded before us.
The iceberg salad, centre cut from a whole head of lettuce,
is drenched in tangy, chunky Dana blue cheese dressing.
Even the black-and-white celebrity photos on the walls
look the same. And the familiarity is deeply, deeply
satisfying—to me and to the mobile and local business
crowd that calls this place home.
The thing is, steakhouses aren’t just defined
by the food. For anyone who came of age in North America
in the last century they’re awash in nostalgia.
Think Prohibition-era, beefsteak-serving speakeasies
in Chicago. Frank and Dino sawing into a sirloin in
Vegas. Ten-year-old me, out for a birthday-dinner steak
(with a pink plastic cow stuck in it) with my family.
They’re about giant shrimp cocktails, Caesar salads
tossed and bananas Foster flambéed tableside.
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