Supersize Me

With cuts of meat that tip the scales, Table 31 may be too much of a good thing.

by Trey Popp

Mark Stehle AX MAN: Table 31's 24-ounce tomahawk steak (ribeye on a 12-inch bone) and a side of Italian long hot peppers. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The U.S Department of Agriculture recommends that adults eat 5 to 6 ounces of meat or beans over the course of a day. A healthy serving size is considered to be about 3 ounces. Six ounces of a porterhouse steak contain enough protein and saturated fat to last an active person from one dawn till the next.

None of these numbers apply at Table 31. Chris Scarduzio and Georges Perrier's three-story steakhouse in the base of the Comcast Center has a menu that's all about blowing the lid off any sense of proportion or restraint.

The porterhouse here weighs in at 24 ounces, as does the $68 tomahawk. You can order a bone-in filet mignon that tips the scales at a full pound. On a recent Friday, a table near mine received a smorgasbord of seafood that rode atop a globe of pulverized ice as big as a beach ball. Held aloft by a gigantic white pedestal bowl, the dish-for-two was tall enough to sever sightlines and made me wonder if the server who carried it had donned a weight lifter's belt.

Steakhouses have always been telling reflections of the way Americans think about food. At the drive-thru and the freezer case, food is simply fuel, cheap and cheaply squandered. And so we are a nation of chronic over-eaters who manage to throw more than $50 billion worth of nourishment into kitchen trash cans every year. But steakhouses turn the act of eating into a kind of spectacle. The unadorned cuts of beef, the sauce quarantined in cups and side dishes on separate plates, every portion sized to privilege the hunger of the eye over that of the stomach — it all bespeaks a conviction that even when quality is the aim, quantity is the surest route to its appreciation.

This deeply American philosophy is unmistakable at Table 31. The corporate décor makes for a bland backdrop, but as my wife and I tried in vain to clean our plates, the parties on either side of us posed for photographs in front of their entrées. A spectacle indeed.

That is not to demean the quality of the restaurant's food. As steakhouses go, this is a very good one. A $52 filet of Wagyu beef was exquisitely tender and cooked so precisely to order that it merited a picture in a culinary textbook. Short ribs fell apart in shreds at the gentlest prod of the fork, and I absolutely loved the ultra-thin carrots and parsnips — looking as though they'd been delicately whittled — draped over top.

Those vegetables were the only slender things that ever crossed my field of vision.

In the appetizer course, a gratinée of pork trotters was a little too heavy on cheese and breadcrumbs for the meat to shine as much as it might have — a heaviness that made me wish the dish had been half the size. But a truly inspired lobster soup made up for that. Rich but not heavy, thin but absolutely bursting with flavor, this soup seemed 10 times more lobstery than straight lobster. The shells had obviously been put to stellar use in crafting the consommé, and the addition of minimally cooked cherry tomatoes to the lumps of crab at the bottom gave the bowl a perfect measure of late-summer freshness to contrast with the deeply flavored broth. If the kitchen had done a better job removing shell pieces from the lump crabmeat, this soup would have achieved perfection.

The side dishes I tried were a split decision. Roasted Italian long hot peppers were spicy little flavor bombs, but our mashed potatoes were seeded with bits of black truffles that strangely had no scent or flavor. There sure were a lot of them, though. Puzzling.

There are a lot of wines to choose from, too, on a list that's deepest in the $100-plus range. And the specialty cocktail menu packs a lot of variety into a small space, including a sop to anyone nostalgic for pre-smoking-ban days: the "Smoking Manhattan," featuring bourbon infused with organic tobacco leaves. I loved the "Table 31," which melds light-bodied small-batch bourbon with blackberries and a sage leaf for a masculine drink in which fruit doesn't overstep its proper bounds.

As for proper bounds with respect to the sheer quantity of food, and the price it carries, there simply are none. For many people, that will come as welcome news. I had trouble adjusting. A pair of appetizers and entrées, plus a couple of sides, two cocktails and a shared dessert, added up to $200 for two. But it was enough food for four — and my wife ordered the smallest possible steak, an 8-ounce filet.

I have a large appetite. I can't remember the last time I let a server take away a plate that still contained carefully made food. At Table 31, we sent back four.

"When we recline at a banquet," Seneca wrote, "one slave mops up the disgorged food, another crouches beneath the table and gathers up the leftovers of tipsy guests."

At least I had not dined in a supine position, vomited or availed myself of a table slave.

I do not hold Scarduzio or Perrier accountable for the mordant turn of my thoughts in the last bloated phase of my dinner at Table 31 — even if I do credit them for eliminating my need for breakfast the next morning. Yet there is something unsettling about a restaurant — or, more accurately, a culture — that abets such extravagant wastefulness.

(This is not true of Table 31's sister operation, the Plaza, which offers al fresco dining on the Comcast Center's handsome plinth. This review was originally to have considered both, but the difference between them is wide enough that the Plaza merits a column of its own in the coming weeks.)

Perrier and Scarduzio have outdone themselves in the creation of an all-American steakhouse. My stomach is just too overstuffed for my hands to come together in untroubled applause.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)