The 20 Best Budget Steaks, Reviewed
Your guide to steaks that cost $22 to $45. Plus: Meaty reviews of The Snail, Papa San, NY Kimchi, Lori Jayne, and elsewhere
Dear Friends!
It is Steven Tyler and Martin Short’s birthday today! And it’s mine too, lol. To celebrate, I’m running a huge discount on subscriptions through the weekend. Subscribers get access to the Budget Steak Guide, one of the longest and most popular columns we publish every year.
Inside the guide, you’ll find reviews of The Snail in Greenpoint (a white-hot newcomer), NY Kimchi (a great new Korean chophouse), Lori Jayne (for $22 au poivre), the fancy Papa San in Hudson Yards (for one of the city’s best steaks), and the newly reopened St. Anselm.
But first…
The Rise of the Denver Steak. And Other Cool Cuts
When St. Anselm prepared to re-open last month following an electrical fire, owner Joe Carroll had a request, as the chef told me during a phone interview: Put another affordable steak on the menu.
Another affordable steak is the key phrase.
New York steak restaurants are splurge restaurants. A bone-in strip can command $100 after a side, tax, and tip.
But St. Anselm rose to fame differently. The Williamsburg hotspot attracted crowds with an indulgent “butcher’s cut,” a butter-drenched hanger steak that cost just $15 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Alas, that was a long time ago. Rising costs have pushed up the steak’s price over the years. It now runs $34.
That’s still a deal! But the increases have not gone unnoticed. Even The Infatuation has written about St. Anselm’s price hikes!
“We’ve had the hanger steak for so long and we’ve tried really hard to keep the price down on it, even though the price keeps going up,” chef Adam Hoffa told me. “So we wanted to have another option for under $40.”
St. Anselm already offered a flatiron in that range, but after a little experimentation, the team added a third cut. It’s called a Denver steak.
Also known as a zabuton, it’s butchered from the underblade of the chuck, a part of the cow that doesn’t get as much work as other muscles. So there’s still some tenderness there, but filet mignon, this is not. Hoffa calls it a “chewy, meaty steak.” It’s more economical than the butcher’s cut, and indeed, Hoffa tells me this option helps the restaurant “keep the price of the hanger steak where it is.”
Equally importantly: Hoffa says servers are excited about the Denver cut — and so are patrons. It’s now the second biggest seller among St. Anselm’s steaks.
In the aughts and early 2010s, skirt steaks and hanger steaks were the go-to affordable cuts at brasseries and other meaty restaurants. Sometimes, they still are. I love a good onglet, as the French call them, packed with unctuous fats and notes of iodine.
Hanger steaks, alas, don’t cost what they used to.
The price of beef continues to rise nationwide — it’s up over 42 percent since before the pandemic — as ongoing Western droughts thin out cattle herds. And so New York restaurants are getting more open-minded about what to offer as smaller, cheaper, entry-level steaks…
Behind the Paywall: The Full Budget Steak Guide
And further notes on cool cuts like teres major, tri-tip, Newport, and zabuton