MEAT YOUR MATCH : Ever Crave a Nice, Juicy Sirloin? Dig a Knife and Fork Into These Steakhouses

Steak. The fashionable scapegoat for the health conscious.

The buzz is that it makes you aggressive.

Clogs the arteries, too.

Just char mine around the edges please.

Once, steak was the undisputed star at top American restaurants. Back then, the red-boothed steakhouses--clubby places that stocked all the best Scotches and cuts of Certified USDA Prime--proliferated. These places hosted all the important social functions. Customers reveled in 32-ounce Porterhouses and onion rings the size of small Hula Hoops.

But things change, and beef-bashing, helped along by the recent hamburger scare, is a fact of life. Oh, new breed restaurants such as Ruth’s Chris and Arnie Morton’s--both in Los Angeles--have breathed temporary life into the genre, but red meat is on several hit lists right now, including those of environmentalists, animal rights activists and nutritionists. And we’re told that more people forswear it every year.

So how come these restaurants are still tough tables on a Saturday night? I recently stopped by Corona del Mar’s Five Crowns, for example, only to run into a 2 1/2-hour wait. The Chart House in Newport Beach, one hour. Cattleman’s Wharf in Anaheim, 45 minutes. What gives?

Not much, it seems. I went out on my very own Orange County steak hunt, and found that little has changed. The restaurants visited are, I hope, a good cross section of local steakhouses. I did eat at one chain (the Chart House) but places like Sizzler, Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus and others of that ilk are not covered, since they are already familiar to most people.

Oh, and by the way--I’m on brown rice until further notice.

Granville’s

There’s no doubt in my mind that Granville’s is the best steakhouse in Orange County. There’s also no doubt it is the most expensive, with various cuts ranging from about $20 to $40. (The Ritz in Newport--see below--is a more expensive restaurant overall, but its steak selections are in the $20 to $30 range.)

That’s because steaks here can be dry-aged Kansas City Prime, the best meat money can buy. The Kansas City strip steak falls into this category. (Some other cuts are Top Choice. Ask your server for an exact breakdown.)

Granville’s steaks are hand-picked by the diners from a rolling marble cart, in the style of great American steakhouses like New York’s Peter Luger or the new Arnie Morton’s of Chicago on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Furthermore, appointments are lavish in this room, all dark, rich-looking wood, carved glass and deep burgundies.

Filet mignon is the smallest steak you can order, and it’s great. Mine came, as requested, charred rare, a bit too black on the outside, perhaps, but perfectly tender and juicy through and through. Granville’s Porterhouse is one monstrous cut, bone in, not nearly as tender as some I’ve tasted, but still a fine piece of meat. I wouldn’t say that about the tough Kansas City strip. For sheer volume, you can’t beat it, but it is the most gristly cut the restaurant serves.

Accompaniments include an especially fine creamed spinach and crisp spears of asparagus in Hollandaise sauce.

Granville’s in the Disneyland Hotel, 1150 W. Cerritos Ave., Anaheim. (714) 778-6600. Open daily for dinner only, 5:30 to 10 p.m. $$$-$$$$

Pinnacle Peak

For price-quality ratio, you can’t beat Pinnacle Peak, a rustic Garden Grove steak outfit that is part of a small, San Diego-based company.

I know of nowhere else where you can eat a 32-ounce monster like the restaurant’s trail boss and pay only $11.95. Even the cowgirl, a relatively small steak here, is a super bargain. Just imagine. One pound. $7.95.

As if that weren’t enough, the meat tastes great. It isn’t Prime, of course, in fact it isn’t even Choice. The meat is Select, exactly the same grade you get at the local supermarket (though Pinnacle Peak buys its from a private meat company). What makes it so good? Simple. This is the one restaurant that uses real mesquite to barbecue steaks, giving them a homey taste you can only match in your back yard.

The steaks are cooked on a huge fire pit that must be 20 feet across, and the pitmen are adept at doing them up exactly the way you like. That explains the crowds, people lining up in pickups, trailers, RVs and yes, even a Mercedes or two at the 5 p.m. opening time.

There are only a few things to go with your steaks here, but all are delicious: smoky, peppery beans, thick slices of white bread and salad that comes with large blobs of dressing. Oh, and don’t wear a tie if you come here. If you do, someone might sneak up, cut the thing off, and hang it from the rafters, alongside the thousands of tie remnants already here.

Pinnacle Peak, 9100 Trask Ave., Garden Grove. (714) 892-7311. Dinner only, Sunday through Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday till 10 p.m. $-$$

The Chart House

This national chain is proud of the fact that each of its 68 locations has a different, often stunning architectural style. (The Dana Point Chart House, in fact, is positively spectacular.) But I decided to eat in the well-known Newport Beach property, smack in the middle of a harbor-front steakhouse row that includes John Dominis, Cano’s and the just-opened Billy’s at the Beach. All of these restaurants serve steak--and how.

The Newport Chart House reminds me of an exquisitely done coffee shop: a low ceiling, sleek, modern lines and lots of dweeby, artificial lighting to go with that mildly nautical design scheme. The menu boasts that the beef is “the Midwest’s finest corn-fed beef, USDA Top Choice.” You can see a bunch of good old surfer boys cooking up the steaks on yet another gas grill. They’ve got nothing to hide, because the nicely trimmed and tasty steaks here are straightforward and well prepared.

The large New York pepper steak comes coated with partially cracked black peppercorns, doused with a light cream sauce and sizzled table-side in an iron pan. The sauce doesn’t overwhelm, and though the meat, ordered rare, turned up medium, that is no problem--in fact, we practically had to beg the server not to take it back to the kitchen.

This was also the one restaurant in which I tested the kitchen’s mettle by ordering a steak well done. For that dubious honor, I selected the menu’s petite filet mignon.

Many restaurants advertise that they won’t be responsible for steaks cooked well done, but there will always be those who order it that way. (If it’s for health reasons, though, that’s hardly necessary. There’s a big difference between having unwanted substances ground into hamburger and finding them in a USDA-inspected sirloin.)

In any case, this poor steak was a sad sight indeed, shriveled up like a raisin and blackened to a frazzle. Even the chain’s surprisingly good sauce Bearnaise couldn’t resurrect much flavor.

The Chart House, 2801 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach. (714) 548-5889. Dinner nightly, 5 to 10 p.m. $$$

The Barn

One wonders how this vast, slightly rundown-looking restaurant, with its dark, cavernous countenance and lurid red wallpaper, has stayed competitive through the years.

It certainly doesn’t help that the entrance is hidden in the rear of a large strip mall behind a Thrifty Drug Store, nor that the prices, up to $21.95 for a Porterhouse steak, are not nearly commensurate with the appointments.

But the Barn in Costa Mesa (which is not affiliated with the Barn Restaurant and Saloon in Tustin) continues to have its fans, and there is an upside to the operation. It’s more than likely many of the restaurant’s customers enjoy the casual, Western-style motif, for instance. Waiters greet you with a friendly “howdy, pardner” for example, and twirl bottles of A-1 Steak Sauce as if they were six-guns. Furthermore, the walls are full of wagon wheels, yokes and other artifacts from the Old West. Yippee, or should I say yippeeio?

The grub is reasonable. Steaks are cooked on a gas charcoal grill. They come in two sizes: barn (1 1/2 pounds), for large appetites, and shed (a pound), for more moderate ones. The shed-sized barn-burner is a Porterhouse, reasonably tender and slightly redolent of smoke. It had a mite more gristle than I would have hoped for, but otherwise no complaints. Cloverburner is the house filet mignon. It comes wrapped in bacon and is extremely flavorful.

Have the meats with sides like large, mealy baked potatoes or terrific, smoky whole beans, the very best thing I tasted at this restaurant. The house bread, under-grilled and over-buttered, is unspeakable.

The Barn, 2300 Harbor Blvd., Suite 31, Costa Mesa. (714) 641-9777. Lunch Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday till 3 p.m.; dinner Monday through Friday, 4 to 10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 3 to 10 p.m. $$-$$$

The Beefcutter

The Beefcutter is the quintessential neighborhood steakhouse, with a twist. The twist is that the food is good.

You wouldn’t think so at first look. The atmosphere is a cross between homey and dreary, all gray clapboard and brick. The bar tables are covered in thick vinyl. The lights are dim and the crowd is fairly reserved.

But when it comes to steak, this place delivers. The waitress couldn’t tell me whether the beef was Choice or Prime, but she did say, “I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.” And she was right. These steaks may be cooked on another gas grill, but the grill is fiery hot, hot enough to put a beautiful black char on any steak you order.

I tried a New York (a generous cut, about 12 ounces) cooked medium-well and that’s exactly what I got, with mere traces of red in the center of the steak, the rest a fine grayish pink.

I also sampled a top sirloin cooked medium well, a surprisingly juicy and finely grained piece of beef. One more option worth exploring here is the restaurant’s London broil, essentially flank steak, thinly sliced, served with good sauteed mushrooms.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the sides--steak fries, coleslaw, good homemade soups and crisp salads of iceberg lettuce--are just short of top notch, better than anyone wandering into this little haunt would have a right to expect.

The Beefcutter, 2391 S. El Camino Real, San Clemente, (714) 492-4653. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. (sometimes later on weekends). $$-$$$

The Ritz

Owner Hans Prager might bristle at having his Newport palace of gastronomy called a steakhouse, and I wouldn’t blame him. The Ritz is easily the most ornately decorated and lavishly appointed of all local restaurants, and the menu runs to everything from bouillabaisse to roast Petaluma duck.

But sit yourself down in one of the black leather semi-circular booths in this restaurant with a good single malt Scotch, and steak does seem like the perfectly appropriate choice. Hans’ daughter, Karen Prager, who ministers well to her clients during the evening, urged me to try the dry-aged pepper steak. “It’s spicy,” she said, “and terrific.”

It turns out that this steak is uncommonly rich, flamed as it is in Hennessey cognac and made with a good deal of cream. Therefore, I opted for an Angus beef culotte steak, Prime meat of course, accompanied by delicious, thinly sliced roasted potatoes and the restaurant’s famous creamed corn.

Ask for a steak rare at the Ritz and you get it rare, or the waiter will whisk it back to the kitchen at light speed. This is soft, full-flavored beef, deeply red and tender, the one flaw being an occasional unwanted chewyness.

A steak at a restaurant like the Ritz is enough to make anyone feel prosperous, and forget about that upcoming visit to the internist.

The Ritz, 880 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach. (714) 720-1800. Lunch Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; dinner Monday through Thursday, 6 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 5:30 to 11 p.m. $$$$

* How Much?

The prices are based on average dinner costs for a party of two, without wine.

Price scale:

$ = under $15

$$ = $15 to $39

$$$ = $40 to $75

$$$$ = over $75