Wolfgang's Steakhouse by Wolfgang Zwiener

• Cuisine(s): American, Steakhouse
  Hours: Sun 5pm-10:30pm, Mon-Thu 11:30am-10:30pm, Fri 11:30am-11:30pm, Sat 5pm-11:30pm
  Price: $$$$
• Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover
  Features: Business Dining, Patio/Sidewalk Dining, Private Party, Takeout
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
• Alcohol: Full bar
  Reservations: Accepted
  Parking: Garage, Valet

Description

Dinner at Peter Luger, a smelly, 120-year-old, investment-banker-ridden dump in Williamsburg, often considered the best steakhouse in New York, tends to be a very specific routine, no menus necessary. You order steak for two, steak for three or steak for four from a man who looks like your shifty Uncle Joe. There is the mandatory tomato-and-onion salad, dressed at table with a glug from a bottle of steak sauce, and possibly a slice or two of bacon cut thick enough to repel rocket-propelled grenades. There is a cursory browse through the wine list, which is basically a roster of the cabernets you'd find on a supermarket shelf priced like fine Bordeaux. You will order creamed spinach and you will order cottage fries, although you will touch neither of them, and when Uncle Joe comes back with the meat, sliding an upside-down saucer under the superheated platter so that the scorched butter and the juices from the steak collect in a little reservoir at the bottom, you slump your shoulders in frustration, because the presliced porterhouse looks as if it's going to be as disappointing as the rest of the meal. Wolfgang's Steakhouse, famous mostly for the completely justifiable infringement lawsuit filed by Wolfgang Puck - whose Spago is right across the street - endeavors to be identical to Luger, from the battered china and the lousy onion rolls in the bread basket to the proprietary brand of steak sauce on the tables. (Zwiener was headwaiter at Luger for decades.) The wine list is not just bad but unbelievably bad, at least if you're not making an above-the-line salary, and the steaks are priced within spitting distance of what you probably paid for your first car. The karma is bad: It occupies the space of a former tofu-specialty restaurant. The waiters try to get you in and out in about half an hour, and if it weren't for the full quart of whipped cream they pour on a slice of Junior's cheesecake, they'd probably succeed. But then the sputtering porterhouse comes, and the little saucer is slid under the plate, and the waiter starts to spoon the darkening juices onto the slices of meat that are going right to you, and that old black pit opens up again, right on schedule.