Peter Luger Takes it on the chin

There is the hiss of butter and melted tallow as they slide down the hot platter, past the sliced porterhouse or rib steak and their charred bones, to make a pool at one end. The server will spoon some of this sizzling fat over the meat he has just plated, generally with some line like “Here are your vitamins.”


NY Times Review


Other restaurants, and not just steakhouses, age that beef to make flavor grow and intensify and double back on itself; dry-aging at Luger still results in a tender steak, but it rarely achieves a hypnotic or compelling or even very interesting one.

But those other restaurants are not Peter Luger, as Friedrich Nietzsche might have said.

“When in this essay I declare war upon Wagner,” Nietzsche wrote in “The Case of Wagner,” “the last thing I want to do is start a celebration for any other musicians. Other musicians don’t count compared to Wagner.”

I don’t think he’s really breaking new ground here. People know about where Peter Luger really stands in the hierarchy of NYC restaurants, but ouch to read that.