Year of the Cow

On a Saturday night at the Oak Room in the Copley Fairmont, the mounted deer heads on the carved wood walls overlook a scene of calculated prosperity. Women with fresh blowouts and showy diamonds eat their salads and petite tenderloins, while thick-fisted men carve into rosy hunks of meat. The waiters, avuncular and a bit weary-seeming, move among upholstered banquettes, turning off the little table lamps as guests leave, collecting the silver cutlery. The food is exactly what you’d expect: massive cuts, cooked to order; gratin dishes of spinach; wan broiled tomatoes; plates of olives like your great-aunt’s relish tray. This is the comforting steakhouse of your childhood (if your childhood was sufficiently affluent), recalling New York–style prototypes like the Palm and Peter Luger.

A few blocks away, where chef Pino Maffeo recently turned his avant-garde Restaurant L into Boston Public, the only carved wood is found on the antique Chinese screens that frame a minimalist dining room in muted shades of brown. The crowd is all-ages, multiethnic, urban and suburban. Instead of olives, waiters bring thyme-spiced flatbread, and the steaks are crowned with pats of miso butter. And yet, while his restaurant has almost nothing in common with the Oak Room save for the rib-eye, New York sirloin, and filet that it serves, Maffeo makes it clear that Boston Public is a steakhouse, too.

It is a striking change in course: Three years ago, when Restaurant L first debuted, Maffeo was considered one of the city’s edgiest chefs, a push-the-envelope type of guy famous for using centrifuges to clarify his sauces and layering his margarita sponge cake with homemade pop rocks. In opening a steakhouse, he’s chosen a cuisine where “technique” amounts to creating artfully placed grill marks, and “innovation” is adding herbs to the mashed potatoes. And he’s not the only one. This year alone, Ken Oringer and Jamie Mammano, celebrated chefs best known for their adventurous French restaurants, have joined the herd with KO Prime and Mooo, respectively. Another Francophile restaurateur, Seth Woods of Aquitaine and Gaslight, will open Prime 128 in Newton by early 2008.

It’s certainly a surprising trend, in this otherwise eco- and health-conscious era. But when you crunch the numbers, the fact that the steakhouse is sweeping the Boston food scene makes perfect—if slightly disheartening—sense.