[Kzin]

Where Only the Salad Is Properly Dressed
By FRANK BRUNI

IT may be laughable when someone says he gets Penthouse magazine for the articles. It’s no joke when I say I went to the Penthouse Executive Club for the steaks.

Over the years I’d read reports that this pleasure palace, on a stretch of West 45th Street closer to the edge of Manhattan than most diners venture, peddled more than one kind of seductive flesh. And I felt obliged — honestly, I did — to check it out, knowing that great food often pops up where you least expect it.

You can find bliss in the soulless cradle of a strip mall. Why not the topless clutch of a strip club? And so, early this month, I gathered three friends for an initial trip (dare I call it a maiden voyage?) to the Penthouse club — or, more specifically, to the restaurant, Robert’s Steakhouse, nestled inside it.

We were strangers to such pulchritudinous territory, less susceptible to the scenery than other men might be, more aroused by the side dishes than the sideshow: underdressed, overexposed young women in the vestibule, by the coat check, at the top of the red-carpeted stairs up to the restaurant, on the stage that many of the restaurant’s tables overlook.

“Are you hungry?” one of these women said, making hungry sound like an X-rated word. “Ravenous?”

Speechless was more like it. We sat down in a cocktail lounge at the front of the restaurant. A beautiful woman claimed the plush armchair opposite mine. She introduced herself. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her name correctly.

“Mahogany?” I said.

“Yes,” she purred.

I was getting my bearings. “Mahogany,” I asked, “do you know where you’re going to?”

She didn’t miss a beat, noting the reference, summoning the singer, and moving on to another of the dreamgirl’s hits. “I’m ... coming ... out!” she sang, waving her arms, wiggling her hips. Mahogany and I would get along just fine.

She said she was running low on cabernet. I took the cue and asked if I could buy her a fresh glass. “Yes,” she said. “And you can pour it on my toes.”

Didn’t happen. And when one of her sorority sisters sidled up to us to pose a question not commonly uttered in fine-dining establishments — “Is there anyone I can get naked for?” — the response was silence. On this visit to Robert’s and on subsequent ones, I was derelict in my duty, failing to sample much of what the restaurant had to offer.

But the beef, I devoured — breathlessly, ecstatically. As it happens, Robert’s has some of the very best steaks in New York City.

Its atmosphere, granted, isn’t for everyone, and it has other shortcomings as well. The men who actually wait on the tables are less attentive and personable than the women who hover around them (and, it should be noted, vanish quickly if shooed away). The prices of some dishes, pumped up to reflect the entertainment on hand, might also be called topless.

But no matter what your appetite for the saucy spectacle accessorizing these steaks, you’ll be turned on by the quality of the plated meat.

That has been noted or at least hinted at before, in publications as varied as The New Yorker, Saveur and Men’s Fitness. (Robert’s gets around.) But I had my doubts until I tasted the steaks myself and compared them, in a condensed period, with their most fabled peers around town.

I made my way back to Sparks, where the plump shell steak had the discernibly rich taste of prime beef and yielded to a knife that seemed better suited to butter. I traveled anew to Peter Luger, where the flavor of the porterhouse had real depth, along with the muskiness and mineral quality that often come with dry aging, but on this occasion the meat lacked its usual char.

At Robert’s Steakhouse I got char, richness, depth and a more pronounced degree of aging, an unmistakable tanginess that accentuated and stretched out the beef’s flavor. I got it in the bone-in strip steak ($53), the rib-eye for two ($104) and the porterhouse for two ($106). All of these had spent at least 6 and as many as 10 weeks in a special vault where their custodian, Adam Perry Lang, rigorously controls the humidity and the air flow.

Mr. Lang, the restaurant’s executive chef since it opened in 2003, is a serious carnivore. He divides his time between Robert’s and Daisy May’s barbecue, which is nearby and which he co-owns. His résumé includes Guy Savoy in Paris and Daniel on the Upper East Side.

What’s he doing with lap dancers? Let me rephrase that: what’s he doing in the same theater as lap dancers? He said in a recent phone conversation that he’s getting more control over the food than he might at another restaurant.

He not only ages but also cooks the steaks as he sees fit: in a broiler with two decks, each a different temperature, allowing the kitchen staff to move the steaks around and to make sure their exteriors are seared just right. The steaks are brushed with canola oil before they go into the broiler and with olive oil after they come out. Little more than salt and pepper is added to that.

Mr. Lang also struts his stuff with a handful of surprising successes on an uneven menu that, for the most part, treads the usual turf: Caesar salad, creamed spinach, shrimp cocktail, crab cake, rack of lamb. Two of the best appetizers, a seafood salad and a tuna tartare, are enticingly seasoned with bonito flakes, nori, sesame seeds and sriracha, a Thai chili paste. A third standout, dominoes of uncooked hamachi, comes with slivers of jalapeño and splashes of dashi and mirin.

The onion rings are fat and crunchy, and cream and bacon turn a side of brussels sprouts into something naughty, though not as naughty as the most unusual dessert. It’s called a buttery nipple, and it involves one of the women straddling your lap, tilting your head back, pouring a combination of Baileys Irish Cream and butterscotch schnapps down your throat, and squirting Reddi-wip into your mouth. It costs $20 in cash. Note to the newspaper’s expense auditors: I don’t have a receipt.

In the end, though, the steaks are the thing. The steaks and the conversation.

Meet Foxy. When I visited Robert’s on Valentine’s Day in a mixed-gender group (not all that unusual at the restaurant), she approached our table to hawk neck and shoulder massages, also $20 apiece.

“Foxy,” I began, then stopped myself, wondering if I was being too familiar. “Are you and I on a first-name basis, or should I address you as Ms. Foxy?”

“You can call me Dr. Foxy,” she said.

“Is that an M.D. or a Ph.D.?”

“Yes,” she answered.

The doctor coated her hands with moisturizer and, less seductively, antibacterial gel. She knows how to make a guy feel special.

The guy in question was one of my companions, whose collar she had already spread so she could get at his skin. She told us that she used to work at Scores, a disclosure that raised an interesting question. Is there a strip club arc of professional advancement, with the Hooters overachievers graduating to Scores and the Scores valedictorians to the Penthouse Executive Club?

And what’s after that? A cameo on Howard Stern’s show?

Another night, another set of attendants: Indica and Brianna. Brianna took an interest in my friend Michael, who instead took an interest in my new BlackBerry cellphone. Not to be left out, Brianna volunteered that her phone was a Sidekick, which has e-mail and Web-browsing capabilities.

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Remembering my mission and the dictates of journalistic accuracy, I asked them how to spell their names. Although Indica no doubt deemed the question curious, she was too smooth a pro to let on.

But Brianna seemed rattled.

“Two n’s,” I said, “or one?”

She stared at me blankly.

“I never thought about it,” she confessed. “You know, it’s not my real name.”

I couldn’t have guessed. With a job like this one the learning curve is endless, and it takes you in directions you never expected to go.

http://events.nytimes.com/2007/02/28...ws/28rest.html