Well, I haven't been looking forward to making this follow-up post but here goes...
Just about as soon as I'd figured out that I'd be able to make a quick trip to the States over Easter, I started looking at making an order with Lobel's meats. I found
Lobels.compretty early on in my Internet food explorations and have been waiting years to try them. Heck, I know the site inside out and have even been instrumental in a few gifts been ordered through them so I was pretty excited with this opportunity.
After a little negotiating with my father and brother, we settled on 3 20 oz. bone-in, dry-aged strip steaks. The price? Well, we're talkin' Lobel's beef, here... It's not without a little embarrassment that I type: 190.00 bucks (including shipping). But, heck, we had reason to celebrate, we all love good steaks and we decided to bite the bullet. We made the order a few weeks in advance, arranged for a Good Friday delivery and started anticipating.
Sure enough, around 10:00 a.m. on Good Friday, 2007
a beautiful box appeared on my father's doorstep. We opened it expecting to see three examples of the finest dry-aged beef available in the United States.
Here's what we saw:
Now, this picture's got a little unfortunate glare but perhaps you get the overall impression. I was underwhelmed. They didn't have the knock-out effect I was expecting. One of the steaks (on the right) looked a little anemic, there was a decent amount of fat that hadn't been trimmed (that's suet priced at just under 60 bucks a pound, mind you...), the marbling was kind-of, well, chunky and meat itself even looked a little strange - sort of grainy and with small pockets or holes in it.
And this was the state they were in after a few days loosely covered with butcher's paper in the refridgerator. I won't even start on how they looked coming out of their vacuum-sealed packaging...
But, I still wanted to give them a chance.
Come Saturday, it was time to show the wares to my brother and think about putting them on the grill. His initial reaction was probably about the same as mine. On a whim and as I was working on the rest of our dinner, I got out my father's digital scale and set each of the steaks on it.
How Lobel's 20 oz., dry-aged, bone-in strip weighs in:
(edited to include: Please read the subsequent posts in this thread for clarification regarding the correct reading of this scale.)
Assuming that this was an unfortunate fluke, we weighed no. 2:
And no. 3:
Not good.
I will give Lobel's this: they've got decent customer service. One call (with one follow-up a few days later) and we'd gotten a no-questions-asked 50 dollar refund. We actually took the scale pictures in anticipation of hassles. However, some (more) damage was unfortunately done.
We did our best treatment nonetheless:
Served with asparagus, green beans, roasted potatoes and homemade bearnaise and bordelaise sauces:
It's difficult for me to objectively judge these steaks. They had quite a few strikes going against them by this time. The price alone nearly makes ones expectations impossible to meet. When this is compounded by being shipped and charged for a steak that is two sizes smaller than what we'd ordered* and the overall so-so appearance, well, I suppose you could say that I didn't want to like these steaks.
And I didn't. Not really, at least. The thing that really got me was the texture. I found these steaks to be grainy and/or mealy. I wasn't blown away by any dry-aged flavor, either. I frankly saw nor tasted any difference between these steaks and the dry-aged steaks I've purchased from Whole Foods and Fox & Obel several times and for about one third of the cost. Good, even great steaks but 60.00 bucks/pound steaks? Not in my book.
So, please take the for what it is: one guy's experience with purchasing this beef one time. I'm convinced that Lobel's can do better but honestly won't be giving their mail-order business another chance. I'll save my money until I get the opportunity to visit their actual Manhatten store (where a combination of personal customer service and my own eye when choosing steaks would hopefully alleviate many of these problems).
Last edited by
Bridgestone on May 9th, 2007, 1:54 am, edited 4 times in total.