Bourbon Steak

Bourbon Steak overall score: 91

Bourbon Steak is a brand new spot that just took over the restaurant and bar space at the luxurious Essex House/JW Marriott hotel on Central Park South. They opened two weeks ago. Check out the review below!

Flavor: 8

We had the 20oz bone in rib eye.

While it was a bit thin, it packed a punch for flavor. Good crust outside and lots of juiciness inside.

Not dry aged, but still a good one.

Choice of Cuts & Quality Available: 9

There’s a great selection of cuts here, but only one was dry aged (the 40oz porterhouse). I took a point for that. I was impressed to see domestic, Aussie and Japanese wagyu on the menu as well. Great stuff!

Portion Size & Plating: 8

The sizes are all pretty standard for NYC steakhouses, and the plating was a mix of simple/elegant, and modern.

Price: 8

Everything is so expensive now, so this category is going through a big renovation, but here is the bill:

Bar: 10

The bar here is big and gorgeous. They offer a lot of really unique signature cocktails as well as standards, and there’s a huge wine list.

Specials and Other Meats: 8

This place offers veal and duck as far as other meat items go. We tried the veal, which came out very late (we were already done with our steak). It was good/tasty, but a bit overcooked (we asked for medium rare, it was closer to well done).

Apps, Sides & Desserts: 10

We started with a custom seafood tower with items we selected from the seafood cart:

We went with clams, oysters, abalone, prawns and uni/sea urchin.

Everything was incredible! Our next app was the soft shell crab, which is stuffed with crab cake. Very unique and delicious! They said there were two here, but that was not the case… I don’t know where they learned to count…

For sides, we went with the very unique creamed spinach souffle, which ate similar to a popover.

We also did some mushrooms.

For dessert, another unique item, the banana tart with macadamia nut ice cream. Really nice!

Seafood Selection: 10

Based on the apps we had, I would definitely suspect the entree fish items are great as well. The tuna foie-poivre sounds insanely good.

Service: 10

Service was great despite the restaurant opening just two weeks ago. We had two staff members attending to us. One seemed seasoned, and the other seemed new (he was good – very attentive). The only hiccup we had was the veal coming out much later than we expected. We thought maybe they forgot it, so we told them to cancel it if they hadn’t fired it. But then brought it out anyway as we were finishing our steak, and they took it off the bill for us in the end. Totally unnecessary! We made sure to tip well for that.

Also worth noting here is that the table bread is scrapped in favor of a trio of French fries! Knowing this was the case, we skipped a potato side altogether. These were amazing.

They also give you some chocolate bars with your check. These toffee and caramel milk chocolate bars blow those Peter Luger chocolate coins out of the water.

The staff was also great at wishing me a happy birthday. They had a card for me, signed by the staff, and there was even a little miniature ice cream cone that came out with dessert (forgot to take a pic).