By Julia Reed
Nov. 12, 2007 issue

I love steak. I was born in Greenville, Miss., home of the legendary Doe’s Eat Place, where, I am told, I ate my first bite of solid food. It was a piece of rare porterhouse on my mother’s fork, bathed in drippings the color of crude oil and cooked in the same Southbend broiler that has been parked just inside the restaurant’s front door since the 1940s. When I first moved to Manhattan, my apartment was across

the street from Smith & Wollensky; now I live in New Orleans, birthplace of the Ruth’s Chris chain and home of Crescent City Steak House, a cherished dive with curtained booths. I’ve been lucky, but these days, no matter where you live, you don’t have to order from Omaha to get a good steak. In the last 10 years the number of the nation’s steakhouses has exploded. Venerable chains like The Palm and Morton’s have been joined by such popular newcomers as Fleming’s and Strip House. The number of topnotch steakhouses in New York City alone has burgeoned from “barely 20” to almost 100, says Tim Zagat, cofounder of the Zagat guides.

But along the way, something has happened to the lowly sirloin—and its environs. Clubby red leather has given way to red velvet at Strip House; Manhattan’s trendy new STK features a DJ. At Peter Luger, the justifiably renowned, bare-bones establishment in Brooklyn, the choice has been the same for more than a hundred years: dry-aged porterhouse for two, three or four. But at Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak, the options number no fewer than 20, and include steaks aged up to 78 days from cows who ate either corn or grass in eight different states. There’s also the increasingly de rigueur Wagyu, a breed of cattle that produces densely marbled beef, the richest of which comes from Kobe, Japan.

At Wolfgang Puck’s Cut, housed in a stunning, Richard Meier-designed space in Los Angeles’s Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel, the menu is similarly packed and the vibe is definitely hip. But Puck brings the same artistry to the end product as he does to all of his multitudinous endeavors. The steaks—and the to-die-for sides—are perfect. Seasoned with salt, three kinds of pepper and thyme, they’re grilled over a charcoal and oak-wood fire (in a nod to California traditions) before being finished in a 1,200-degree broiler. (The temperature of the broiler has become yet another menu selling point—at Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Steak, for example, it’s 1,700). The most expensive offering is the eight-ounce Japanese Wagyu rib-eye for $160—and, it must be said, it’s exceptional.

The uninitiated may laugh when I say it’s the best steak I’ve had outside of Doe’s, where the use of choice meat (one rating below prime) makes it an anomaly among today’s steakhouses, but it does not make the steaks any less delicious. Lest you think I’m biased by a back-brain memory of that first phenomenal porterhouse, let me assure you that the place is packed every night, often with people who have come from hundreds of miles away. This year, the restaurant was named one of America’s classics at the James Beard Foundation Restaurant Awards. (Cut was a nominee for best new restaurant.)

When I ask Doe Signa Jr., who took over stove duties when his father retired in the ’70s, what the broiler’s temperature is, he says, “I have no idea. Hell, we just turn it on and let it go.” He seasons the steaks with a mixture of salt and Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, whose ingredients are remarkably similar to Puck’s own blend. Doe thinks the secret is “that old stove.” And then there is the hand of the cook. Both Puck and Signa are passionate about what they do, and that, in the end, may well be more important than the pedigree of a steak.