Dinner: Prime Quarter, Appleton, WI
Review — Tonight we ate at my other favorite Appleton restaurant, the Prime Quarter. As alluded to by Patrick in today’s journal, this is a restaurant like none I have ever seen, whereby you are seated and then told to head up to the deli cases to pick out your steak. Then, not only do you pick it out, you cook it yourself on a huge grill built into the middle of the restaurant. I know there are some people who do not feel that there is a purpose in going out to dinner if you still have to cook your own food (my Melting Pot-loathing father being one of them), but there is something magical about the Prime Quarter.
Let us begin by discussing the salad bar. Normally, if you were to tell me a restaurant had a salad bar, I would say, “Great! Where else can we go?” I am not a big fan of getting up once I have been seated. But since the whole experience at the Prime Quarter is very interactive, the salad bar works well. They have the perfect amount and choices of toppings (heretofore referred to as “fixin’s”). Red onions, mushrooms, slices of hard boiled eggs… it is all there. And they have none of the gross stuff like the pickled herring my dad used to fancy at the Maas Brothers buffet in Sarasota (sorry, Dad… you’re not getting a lot of love in this review!). I am also a big fan of their ranch dressing, which is heavy on spices and low on the bitter creaminess some ranches possess. I should also mention that at the salad bar, you can get baked potatoes with all the fixin’s, but as I am not a fan of the baked potato in general, I cannot fairly review this particular aspect.
After our salads were cleared, we headed to the deli cases, where the real fun began. First, we chose our steaks (filet for me, NY Strip for Patrick). Then we carved out a spot at the grill, which is about 6 feet wide by 12 feet long. Plenty of room for steaks and lots of gathering room, to boot. Assembled on the sides of the bar are the following: vat of melted butter (meat only), vat of melted butter (bread only), salt, pepper, Montreal steak seasoning, garlic salt, garlic powder, and seasoned salt. Fixin’s galore!!! A true cardiologist’s nightmare.
We first basted our steaks with the butter, then set to seasoning them. One rookie mistake to watch out for is the roasting of one’s arm as you lean over the grill to season. Best idea is to season close to the edge and then push the steak out over the open flame. Basting and seasoning complete (to tell you our secret combinations would be to ruin the fun for your future visit to the Quarter), we pushed our steaks to the middle and waited for the fire to do its work.
Meanwhile, we snagged a few pieces of unadulterated bread from the basket and set to work fixing the best Texas toast this side of the Mississippi. As I previously mentioned, there is an entire vat of butter set aside for the sole purpose of buttering this bread to your heart’s content. And so we did. We also like to combine both the garlic powder and salt (a precarious formula) to achieve the perfect salty, garlicky, and most importantly, buttery, piece of bread. As the steaks browned on the outside, we gingerly placed the toast on the outskirts of the grill, knowing from past experience that placing the toast too close to the flames can result in in, not Texas toast, but Texas charcoal. Big difference.
After about 15 minutes, the steaks were ready to come off. (Well, ours were, thanks to Patrick’s master chef skills at the grill, but Erik had been a little too cautious at placing his steaks in the middle and was forced to remain at the grill for a few minutes more.) We eagerly dug in and were met with sheer perfection (as Erik pointed out, a bad review would only reflect poorly on our own cooking skills). The steaks were done exactly the way we wanted them, and the Texas toast was perfectly crispy and awesomely seasoned. After one trip back to the grill for more toast, we were stuffed to the gills and ready to roll ourselves home. But only after a stop at the local DQ….