But folks you can’t beat that Bloomin’ Onion in even the swankiest of steak joints. A review of a recent eating experience at Outback tells it all.
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Outback, the True Story of This Walmart of Steak Joints
Husband made the choice of restaurant for the night and he chose Outback Steak House.
Not that he didn’t have a plethora of eatery choices, goodness, what with us living in a resort area and plenty of steak houses all about.
The choice was fine with me as a)like I say, it was HIS choice and what sort of bad sport would I be to complain about his birthday desire? And b)hey, I like Outback, at least I did on the few prior occasions that had me as a patron of the steak chain.
WEB SITE FOR OUTBACK
Seems to me one can get a right decent steak item, a potato of some sort, perhaps a salad and a roll, at Outback, and for a reasonable price.
Outback has taken the same route as so many restaurants today, which is to charge for a side salad and many side orders. The times are tough, so the saying goes, and by making those items that were once normally part of the dinner a la carte, the restaurant can pull in more cash without actually raising the price of the meals.
It’s a bit of a scam is what I’m saying here but I’ll allow that an argument can be made that there was waste in giving to salads to non-salad folks and a basket of rolls often went to waste.
In many of the meals offered on the Outback menu, a side potato of some sort was included in the price of the dinner and all meals came with a small loaf type thing of warm whole wheat bread. It was good bread as most warm breads are but I prefer the white stuff, yeah, all that gluten, filled with warm sweet-smelling yeast.
Most steak houses offer battered fried onions in some form and fashion. Husband is a big fan of these things although he’ll run screaming from any meal I’d dare serve him at home containing any sort of onion stuff.
We’ve had huge fried onion ring things, onion loaf devices, round things that pretended to have onions within but were mostly fried breadcrumbs. Nothing compares to Outback’s “Blooming Onion”, nothing, not anywhere, not anyhow.
Outback sure has a winner with this menu entrée. All tables around me held a platter of this Blooming Onion thing, shared by the patrons around the table, all dipping and talking and enjoying this splendid appetizer. The dip served with the Blooming Onion is as good as the appetizer itself.
A Blooming onion is an onion cut with some sort of geometrically even device that creates a round onion flower, all the onion “petals” easy to pull from the main onion body. The thing presents quite nicely. The entire onion bloom is dipped into some sort of batter and fried; fried very nicely in fact.
The Blooming Onion won’t make your arteries any softer but it’s not dripping with grease. There’s a pleasant crunchiness to the onion petals and the grease does not overwhelm or distract from the mild onion taste.
One of the biggest surprises of our meal was something called “Walkabout Soup”. Another pleasant surprise, a cup of the stuff was included in my husband’s dinner. Since this is a man who hates to eat with a soup spoon, he told me to order what I wanted as he would eschew the soup.
I don’t know why it’s called “Walkabout Soup” but this is allegedly an Austrailian restaurant chain and those Aussies tend to have cute nicknames for everything. It’s really a “soup du jour” and that evening it was a splendid Cream of Potato Soup.
The soup was delicious in fact, a real surprise. The soup’s cream base was only slightly thickened, not the library paste so many restaurants like to add vegetables to and call soup. There were some green onions sprinkled within, some perfectly cooked potato cubes and it had a pleasant mild spicy taste to it.
Husband had, what else, a New York strip steak. I had a special dinner, one of many featured on the Outback menu.
These specials usually include two main items, smaller portions of each to be sure. Mine was a few slices of something called “tenderloin steak” served alongside a small platter of stuffed shrimp, costing $15.99.
I found the shrimp to be overwhelmed with, well it wasn’t butter, in the true sense of the word. It was that stuff restaurants serve with fish that looks like, and almost tastes like, butter. The shrimp were good, however, nice and tender, a good size. If they’d stop serving them swimming in that oily stuff they’d be a real hit.
The “tenderloin” that came with my meal was, again, not real beef. Like the meat didn’t real come from the hind-quarters of the cow. This tenderloin was some sort of meat that is somehow “re-processed”…somehow ground up and re-formed to look like a slice of a real loin of a cow.
It tasted okay, really, but I wasn’t fooled.
Husband’s steak was real, however. He pronounced it a bit “chewy”, a description he gives to many food items since he had all his top teeth pulled and replaced with dentures. Not that his dentures don’t work fine but hey, they’re not real teeth I must suppose.
I had a bit of that NY strip and thought it was of the right amount of “chewiness”, this was real teeth though my teeth aren’t top notch either.
I had one drink at the Outback, what with husband driving and myself seldom indulging in any sort of alcohol type of drink. Wow. The drinks at the Outback like to kill.
I had to search the entire menu to find one under eight bucks and this was some sort of specialty drink that cost $4.99. It was a good drink and I’d buy it again. But I can afford one. The Outback Steak House is not the place to enjoy a leisurely meal preceeded by a few fine drinks to make us mellow.
Our bill, with a generous tip, came to $69.00. While this isn’t cheap by any means, I’d challenge the meal, drink, warm bread, good meat, fabulous blooming onion and soup, is as good as that purchased at a more expensive steak joint.
Go for a nice meal and, if for no other reason, that Blooming Onion.
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