jimmypribble.com/blog

This begins as a story about a story. As I have contemplated what to blog about over the next couple of weeks, I considered writing a review of the Old Hickory Steakhouse, located in the Gaylord Texan Resort, in Grapevine, Texas. I ate there a couple of weeks ago, while working at my employer’s annual convention. I had there what might have been the best steak of my life. It was easily the most expensive. I ordered the special, which was a bone-in filet not on the menu. I assumed the price would fall in line with the other steaks, which range from $30-$43. They delivered a beautiful steak, cooked rare to just barely medium rare, exactly as I had asked. As is my usual way, I cut the thick steak into strips as thin as possible and lingered over every bite. It was delightful. When I was about halfway through, my friend Peyton leaned across the table and asked if I knew how much my steak cost. I didn’t. “It’s $65, just for the steak,” she said. Ouch! That’s quite a different world for a guy who reviews NightHawk frozen steak dinners on his blog. All told, a dozen of us racked-up a $1400 bill. It was excessive. It was exquisite. It was…expensed! Whew.

Since I was considering writing a review of a steak house, the next step was to go to my clip files and see how a good steak house review is written. I found a review of L.A. steak houses, written by Alan Richman for the March 2003 issue of GQ magazine. Great article, which I re-read over the last couple of nights before I went to bed. Then today, while I was at work, I began to outline the review in my head. I decided there would be no way that I could write a steak house review for my blog, without spending some time with an important detail of my background. My first job, from 1984-1986 (and again very briefly in 1988), was at the Old San Francisco Steak House, here in Austin. It’s an important time and place in my life, which deserves a thorough examination in a later blog entry. Among other things, it was where I met two of my closest friends, Charles Braden and Rob Booth. One of my other best friends, Mat Farabee, got me my job there, when I was 15.

Anyway, as I was thinking about the OSF (as we called it), I wondered how it was doing. I last ate there seven years ago with my groomsmen and friends, before my bachelor party. Even then it seemed different than how I had known it. It seemed to be catering to a different crowd and it felt a little lost. In all of my years of dining out with family and friends, I have never once heard anyone ever suggest eating at OSF. It’s not, nor ever has been on the radar. It has always been in a terrible location, which is only getting worse. So, how could it be surviving? Certainly its days are numbered. Those thoughts were running through my head today. This evening, my mother called and said that she had gone to the OSF just last night (a decent enough coincidence by itself) and found out that Sunday is to be its last day open. They are closing!

Though Mrs. Pribble and I are well over our dining budget for the year, I think I would regret not eating at the OSF one last time. We plan to have dinner there tomorrow night and I’ll have a full report soon.

The Workout: 30 minutes on the home treadmill.

jimmy 

Recently, my friend Rob brought-up the subject of Night Hawk dinners on his blog. Matt weighed-in with his review and the whole subject has sparked some nostalgic interest in me. For those that don’t know, Night Hawk was a steak house chain in Austin, Texas from 1939 through 1994. However, I never ate a meal at one of those retaurants. Instead, I ate Night Hawk TV dinners, which are still available today. I must have eaten 1000 of them. I just confirmed with my mother that we would bring them home ten at a time from the grocery store. My father specifically requested them because he thought that even though they cost a little more than their competitors, they tasted better and were worth the extra expense. He liked the Night Hawk Taste of Texas, which was the standard Night Hawk charbroiled chopped beef patty, with ranch style beans and cornbread. My brother and I didn’t like the cornbread, so we chose from our deep freezer full of Steak ‘n Corn and Steak ‘n Taters, which according to the Night Hawk website, is one of the company’s signature items. So, after not having eaten one of these dinners in close to 20 years, I decided to pick up a Steak ‘n Taters to see if it was as I remembered it.

Night Hawk dinners are widely available here in Central Texas, so there was no problem finding one at a local HEB grocery store. I didn’t think to note the exact price (though it was under $2), nor did I think to compare the price to similar dinners of other brands. Since the sales volume of Night Hawk is much smaller than say a Swanson, I expect the price would be a little higher.

The box has changed over the years, but it is very similar to the way I remember it. The overall design and color scheme, which is handsome and does a good job of invoking a steak house feel, has stayed consistent, which I appreciate. The most obvious change in the design is the Night Hawk logo. Along with the words Night Hawk, there is a flame graphic all over the packaging. Conspicuously absent is the great old Night Hawk logo of…a night hawk! Did the mascot retire? Was there a bitter lawsuit? Did some young, overpriced consultant convince them that the mascot should be thrown into the fire, so to speak? I don’t know, but it’s wrong. Bring back the Hawk! The only other thing that I really notice about the box is that the photo of the dinner used to completely fit on the front, but has grown to be optimistically large (more on that later). The photo also shows a “side salad” of lettuce and tomatos. Fine print tells us that this is a suggested serving. I agree that a side salad probably would be a good thing to serve with this dinner, but taken at its true scale, the photo shows a salad of a pickle-slice sized piece of lettuce and half of a cherry tomato. I think the old box just had a sprig of parsely and was perhaps more honest.

I opened the box and discovered some other changes since I had last had one of these. The old meals came in an aluminum tray covered with a thin piece of waxed cardboard, which was removed before cooking. The new meal comes in a plastic tray, covered with a clear piece of thin plastic film, which is cut before cooking. This new packaging allows the meal to be cooked in a microwave. An even bigger difference is the steak sauce, which now comes in a small condiment packet. The steak sauce used to already be on the steak. In fact, I would scrape any frozen steak sauce which had stuck to the back of the cardboard cover, back onto the steak. Like the suggested side salad, the optional steak sauce is a nod towards healthy eating and I think it was the right thing to do (though really, if you have any kind of dietary restrictions or concerns, you shouldn’t even be looking at one of these things).

I cooked the dinner in the oven, according to the instructions. Now, I would swear that I remembered that the old instructions gave different times for the desired wellness of the meat, but I admit that this could be a false memory. What is not a false memory is that I used to eat these steaks pink in the middle, or medium-rare. So, I pulled this steak out early, hoping for medium-rare, but the steak was still cold. I put it back in for just a couple of more minutes and everything came out hot enough to eat. However, the steak was cooked all the way through. No pink at all. In other words, the steak comes pre-cooked to medium. This wasn’t really that much of a surprise – such are the wimpy times in which we live. I recognize that this is chopped beef and any kind of chopped beef should be cooked more thoroughly than a cut steak, but I’m only asking for things to be the way they were.

I wouldn’t normally plate a TV dinner, but it is more difficult to cut a steak in a tray and besides, the cover photo shows the dinner on a platter (suggested serving). A normal-sized plate really shows off how diminutive this meal really is. Undeterred, I poured the entire contents of the steak sauce packet onto the steak. Yes, it’s true that the sauce is mostly margarine, but for the record, it also contains: salt, mustard powder, lemon juice powder, and garlic powder. It isn’t very good steak sauce, but some people like butter on their steaks, and I used the sauce because that is always how I had my Night Hawk steaks.

The verdict? Except for being over-cooked from the factory, it was exactly as I remembered it, which is to say – pretty good. The steak’s flavor is mostly drowned-out by the sauce, but the charbroiled flavor does come through and matched with a proper steak sauce (or with good dry seasonings), this would be a fine chopped steak. Better still are the tator tots, which could hold their own against any tot in the biz. They have a perfectly-cooked, crispy outside and good potato flavor inside, with just a hint of a meat note from being packaged with the steak. Good God, did I just say meat note? Anyway, after so many years, I was pleased that Night Hawk has mostly stuck to their guns and delivered the same locally-produced, quality experience that I remember from my youth. I could make a better chopped steak of course, but if Night Hawk sold bags of tots, I would buy them. First rate.

Since part of this excercise is about contemplating what I used to eat vs. what I currently eat, I decided to grab a TV dinner from my current stock and compare the two. So, I selected a Lean Cuisine Beef Peppercorn, which is peppercorn sauce over beef steak tips, with green beans, red peppers, and skin potatos. In other words, steak ‘n taters. Now originally, I was going to have a little fun by comparing the nutritional values of these two meals, but that isn’t what ended-up interesting me. The Lean Cuisine, despite my preconceived notions of their portion-control sizes, and despite being packaged in a smaller box, actually contains more food than the Night Hawk steak dinner! The Night Hawk Steak ‘n Taters dinner is 172g, while the Lean Cuisine is a whopping 248g! That’s almost 32% more food and it’s not even a Lean Cuisine “dinner portion” meal. In a market where Swanson boasts of having Hungry-Man dinners with a pound of food, this is interesting.

It was fun revisiting the Night Hawk dinner, so I plan on continuing with a series of articles soon exploring other foods that time forgot…I mean, that I used to eat.

Update 07.26.05: I corrected my article, because I kept saying Swanson’s instead of Swanson. Also, on July 20, amidst this burst of discussion about the TV dinner with my friends and presumably unbeknownst to us, Gerry Thomas, father of the TV dinner, died at the age of 83.

Happy Birthday to me! My wife took me to one of my favorite local restaurants for dinner last night. Carmelo’s is a traditional Italian restaurant with a casual atmosphere (typical of Austin), yet set apart by fine-dining levels of service. Carmelo’s is only a few blocks from my office and we left directly after work, so we were the first dinner customers and had even more undivided attention from the wait staff. We sat Hollywood style in one of the booths in the main dining room, so we could see and be seen, of course. We began dinner with the customary hot bread and olive oil with Parmesan cheese and chunks of garlic. The waiter then helped us select a nice, dry Chianti – Banfi 2001 Chianti Classico Riserva.

This is what Wine.com has to say about it:

“This Chianti Classico exemplifies a modern approach to making this very traditional wine. It’s a satisfying middleweight with good flavor intensity and well-balanced structure, wrapping classic flavors in a sleek package. It has enticing aromas of tart red cherries, saddle leather and a hint of pungent dried herbs. In the mouth, it delivers bright flavors of dried red cherries against the classic Tuscan background of leather and oriental spice. The finish is long and aromatic, with crisp acidity supporting the lingering flavor of red Michigan pie cherries. There’s enough silky tannin and firm acid to warrant cellaring for five or six years. Time in the cellar will soften the wine’s sharp edges and enhance its aromatic breadth and intensity, transforming the coltish charmer into a soft, sumptuous seductress.”

What do I have to say about it? The wine was good. It tasted like grape juice, but with a kick. I liked it!™

After we were served the wine, it was time for the whole raison d’être for any visit to Carmelo’s – the Lobster Bisque. This silky ambrosia tastes almost perfect to my palate, blending lobster and tomato flavors without too much salt, and a hint of fresh cracked black pepper. My only complaint is that the smooth cream was broken-up by only two small chunks of lobster. I wished for more.

In fact, it was my insatiable lust for the Lobster Bisque that caused me to mistakenly order the Lobster Ravioli as my entrée. Normally, I would have ventured into different culinary territory by ordering something like steak or veal. Instead, I simply ordered a variation of what I had just eaten. I was disappointed in myself. Worse, I was disappointed with the entree. It was inconsistant, with some bites being flavorful and others being quite bland, even tasteless. I only ate half. My wife enjoyed the Insalata Carmelo (fresh lump crab meat, shrimp, walnuts, mushrooms and artichokes on a bed of fresh spinach.)

We finished the meal with coffee and Bananas Foster for two, prepared table-side. The dessert was delicious, but not prepared with the flair with which I was trained to prepare them, back when I worked for the Old San Francisco Steak House. Unlike Carmelo’s, I used to cut the bananas at the table (rather than using pre-cut and undoubtedly chilled slices), which added more flair by way of fancy knife work. More importantly, rather than using brandy as the flammable agent, with it’s resulting pilot-light sized flames, I would use 151 proof dark rum in judicious quantities. Flames would shoot three feet into the air and I would have to pull back to save the hair on my face. Whoosh! The customers would enjoy their dessert with their hearts still racing and the flambé orders would pour in.

All in all, it was a very nice birthday dinner. Carmelo’s has a cozy and romantic atmosphere, outstanding service, and good food for higher than average prices, which shouldn’t deter you, if you are seeking an excellent dining experience. At the end of our evening, an accordian player began playing music for the diners. His second song was the theme from The Godfather. Consigliere was pleased.

Reader Feedback

I have to say, though, your picture scares me a little. – Beth

Scary photo of ya though…. – Darin

Regarding the photo of myself on the home page, I was going for a look of “stern determination,” but somehow I came out with a look of “I’m a psychopath.” Look for a revision, soon.