Well, maybe it’s not a surprise that everything exclusively non-meat-related in this book has been relegated to the back pages. But that organizational detail doesn’t reflect at all on the importance of the dishes in this chapter. I love these starters, salads, and sides, and I think they’re absolutely crucial to a good meal.
I want first courses that are both memorable and distinct from the meat courses that follow. The idea is that you have an incredible meal that happens to end with the best steak of your life. Therefore, I put a lot of thought into the rest of the menu, which has led me to a slate of dishes that range from the classic to the exotic. I like to focus particularly on the quality of umami, the so-called fifth taste, which we know as a sense of savory or meaty deliciousness.
Respect for vegetables has long been a theme in my life. Farm to table is now a culinary cliché, but going back to my youth on Long Island, that’s how we’d often get our produce—from a farm stand not far from our house. I thought nothing of it at the time, but we were often eating locally and seasonally—today’s buzzwords of contemporary American cuisine. You’ll see this in the vegetable side dishes here and the salads. To this day, I think of salads as being an essential part of pretty much every meal, so I offer here recipes for simple, basic salads that never fail to make a crisp and perky foil to all the dishes in the book.
As for starters, I want them to be exciting. Being a proud French-trained chef, I tried to imbue these dishes with what I didn’t see in steakhouses: a special touch that says there’s a chef in the kitchen and not just a team of cooks. So I went for dishes that had some character and flair. That’s why below you’ll find a section of exotic takes on the steakhouse cliché of surf and turf, such as bone marrow and caviar or uni and blood sausages.
When I was a kid, all I ate was steak and lamb chops. I would make myself iceberg salad with tomatoes and vinaigrette. So early on, like muscle memory, I fell in love with the contrast between salad and steak. To this day, I can’t really eat a steak without seeing it accompanied by a fresh, bright green salad. Here are the recipes for some of my longtime favorites.*