Description
There was a time when restaurants like the Dal Rae were thick on the ground in Los Angeles, manly places with lushly upholstered booths, heroic tumblers of Scotch, and steaks as thick as the novels of Irwin Shaw. A Dal Rae meal begins with a trough-size relish tray, cherry peppers and celery stalks and cucumbers of tremendous girth, and continues with baskets of cheese toast that taste like Pepperidge Farm Goldfish transformed into oily bread.
You are going to get the pepper steak — a nice hunk of shell steak, an accurate medium rare if that's the way you want it, crusted with cracked pepper and frosted with a salty slurry of bacon and sauteed green onions that probably could enliven tofu. (If you are between paychecks, you can have a hamburger steak done the same way.) It's not Jar, but that's kind of the point. And when the waitress asks if you want her to put in an order for a chocolate soufflé, you will say yes. Because you are a sport, and because that is the way it's done.
