An Omaha Restaurant Redefining the Steakhouse Experience

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/travel/monarch-omaha-steakhouse-restaurant-review.html

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All meat should be hung. That was the directive Patrick Micheels, a chef in Omaha, Neb., took from reading “The River Cottage Meat Book,” a 543-page tome by the British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall that captivated the food cognoscenti in the early 2000s. It’s also the philosophy Mr. Micheels is attempting to instill in the Midwest’s unofficial capital of steak with Monarch Prime & Bar, which opened in October 2017. Nebraska ranks just behind Texas as the state raising the most cattle (in less than a third of the area). Yet of the 25 steak joints in Omaha, Monarch is the first to dry-age steaks in-house.

Dry-aging “makes the fat taste like it’s liquid gold,” Mr. Micheels said. “Think of a sauce reducing on a stove — you’re losing water and condensing flavor, taking the meat to another level. It’s like prime rib squared.” As with almost all of what he serves in the restaurant, the steak is local — butchered 27 miles away in Blair on Tuesday, delivered on Wednesday. “You have to start with the freshest product possible,” he said.

Mr. Micheels knows meat: He grew up across the state in Scottsbluff, hunting and butchering deer, pheasant, turkey and quail — “everything the land had to provide.” While the 45-day-aged Wagyu prime rib my husband and I ate at our recent dinner at Monarch was melt-on-the-tongue tender, it was the other dishes that left me wanting to drive back to Omaha from my home in Colorado, just for another bite.

The fancified French onion dip was what I’d imagine gets served at Warren Buffett’s Super Bowl parties: soubise white onion mousse, with pickled red onion, powdered potato chips and a lump of hasselback caviar (from Missouri). Cuddled with local cherries and peppery nasturtium flowers, my chestnut agnolotti tasted like November in Vermont, the pasta glistening with charred onion chestnut sauce.

My Irish blood ran hot for the baby red potatoes, served atop emulsified crème fraîche and veiled in paprika and dill — a riff on what the chef’s mother used to serve him at breakfast, fresh from the garden. My sole criticism was dessert: The deconstructed s’mores, whose ganache-topped cubes of smoked graham crackers were nearly as leaden as the slice of Nebraska black walnut wood they were served upon.

Set in the circa 1930 Hotel Deco, Monarch’s shadowy 70-seat space felt like an otherworldly backdrop from a Bogart movie, with channel-tufted velvet banquettes and taxidermy butterflies, beetles and cicadas affixed to black floral wallpaper.

“Our steakhouses down here are old school, people wearing big old blazers and green leather boots — ‘got my shrimp cocktail, got my dirty martini’ kind of thing,” Mr. Micheels said. “We wanted to step up the game a little bit.” If my rouge pink New York sour cocktail, frothed with Omaha egg white and studded with a perfect, tweezer-applied line of microflowers, was any barometer, they’ve more than done it.

Monarch Prime & Bar, 316 South 15th Street; monarchprimeandbar.com. Dinner for two, without drinks and tip, is about $110.