Which peter luger is better

The overall experience is the reason Peter Luger should be on your bucket list, but the food - generally, a barrage of red meat - will leave you hoping Deepak Chopra starts endorsing high-fat diets.

Start with a couple sides of extra thick bacon, and then move on to the main attraction: the porterhouse. Old-school servers put thick slices of filet and sirloin on your plate, and then spoon juices from the meat and melted butter on top. After you soak up all those pools of juices with onion bread, your server might suggest one more thing before bringing the hot fudge sundae: pick up the dry-aged t-bone in your hands and gnaw the last of the meat off the bone.

This is less like traditional bacon, and more like when your uncle got his hands on an electric knife at Christmas and cut the ham into inch-thick slabs. Each piece has strips of fat along the sides as well our favorite parts - the charred portions on the ends.

Yes, this is meat as an appetizer before a lot more meat. At Peter Luger, fries and onion rings are your palate cleansers. The German fries hash browns are pretty good, and creamed spinach is always an acceptable thing to put next to a plate of red meat, but the French fries are our favorite side here.

The house cut comes out pre-sliced with filet on one side of the bone and sirloin on the other. This is one of the best cuts of steak in New York City. Inevitably, every plate of meat here starts to look like a piece of abstract art as the pools of juices and butter deepen, and Luger sauce gets smeared across the plate. We like the cap with its layer of fat, but the thick char overwhelms the flavors of the leaner parts. Besides the filet, we like this as much as anything on the menu.

After finishing the last of the meat, you may wonder if restaurants are like bars and cut people off for eating too much. Ignore that feeling and get this hot fudge sundae. It comes topped with a mountain of schlag housemade whipped cream , which you can also order on its own, and use as a dip for the branded milk chocolate gold coins they throw on your table with the check.

Peter Luger, that maxim proves remarkably true. For a steakhouse that delivers on both fronts, head to Keens Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan. Established in , Keens rocks a charmingly vintage aesthetic, with wood-paneled walls, framed portraits, and crisp white tablecloths.

If you want a traditional NYC steak-dinner experience i. Steak connoisseurs have a particular fondness for Wagyu cuts, which come from a Japanese cattle breed famous for producing juicy and butter-soft beef. Did the shrimp really taste like cold latex? The answer, I found, was far more complicated than my first trip to the year-old Brooklyn steakhouse had been. I brought along my friend Will, a steak lover who has been to many of New York's top steakhouses — including Club A and Keens.

I knew he'd be able to help me decide how Peter Luger's porterhouse compared to its competitors. As I walked toward the entrance, New York's usual symphony of jackhammers filling the air, I spotted two tourists on the sidewalk. They were holding up the gold coins Peter Luger hands out with the check, happily snapping selfies with them.

Peter Luger is considered an institution in New York's dining scene, beloved by tourists and locals alike. I couldn't wait to finally try its signature dish. Will and I couldn't hold back our excitement as we breathed in the scent and made our way past a long line of people waiting to hear their name get called. A man in a suit with a clipboard, who I recognized as my bartender from the week before, took down our names and told us it was about a minute wait.

When I inquired about bar seating, seeing it was full, he told us to keep an eye out because it was first come, first served. Just a few minutes later, he called my name and pointed at two empty seats that had just opened up at the bar — making sure we didn't miss them.

Right off the bat, the bartender explained that he was going to take our drink order while a server would come and take our food order. It seemed as if he was getting ahead of one of Wells' main gripes. The critic had complained in his review that Peter Luger's system of ordering from two different people as well as paying two separate tabs when you're seated at the bar was needlessly complicated.

But we hardly noticed as the server, who recognized me from the week before, came by just a few minutes later to take our food order. Since I had already sampled the restaurant's burger, Caesar salad, fries, and bacon, our main focus was on the steak.

The waiter brought it with a basket of bread and a plate with two squares of butter, telling us that "everything was hot" except the shrimp. We laughed at the quip but soon found that the bread was actually quite cold. While I selected a piece that was far softer than the breadstick I tried to chew through last time, both Will and I had been hoping for some hot carbs on the chilly day. Will found the look of the plate, which came with four large shrimp and three lemon wedges, to be a bit strange.

He also wasn't a huge fan of the texture, finding the shrimp to be quite rubbery. But Will did like the taste and thought the cocktail sauce complemented it well. I liked that the shrimp were super meaty, reminding me of the prawns I used to eat when I lived in Australia.

I didn't mind their chewy texture, probably in part because I kept dunking them in the cocktail sauce — which I thought had a nice tang. Before I get into the steak, I need to tell you about this spinach because it was, well, incredible. Now, I like spinach just fine, but I don't go out of my way to have it. I'm a romaine or mixed greens kind of girl when it comes to salads. I once had to make spinach-egg muffins when I tried the South Beach Diet before starting college, and I think I'm still scarred from the taste.

But I would eat an entire bowl of the creamed spinach at Peter Luger by myself if I could. Both Will and I were surprised by how much we loved it. The spinach was soft without feeling mushy or watery, and there was a surprising depth to its flavor. It tasted so much like the filling in my mother's homemade spanakopita Greek spinach pie that I half-expected to find feta cheese hiding in the bowl.

While Will and I were working on the shrimp, our server came over and asked whether we wanted them to hold off on the porterhouse until we were done with the appetizer. I soon realized that this is because the steak comes to your table piping hot.

I kept turning my head as I heard the crackle of sizzling fat, hoping our plate was next. The porterhouse made its entrance to our seats in similarly dramatic fashion. It was still cooking as our server balanced the platter on a smaller overturned plate, resting it at an angle.

The fat pooled at the very bottom, glistening under the fluorescent lights. The porterhouse at Peter Luger is cut from a short loin. On one side of the T-bone is the fillet.