So, I’m sure every one of us has eaten at a really expensive super fancy steak restaurant, where the steak comes as a seared hunk all by itself on a super hot plate and if you want a vegetable you have to pay for it separately as a side dish? Yeah, I love those places! In fact, I live for those places. Sometimes I dream about those places!  Mmm a la carte meat..

This time, the mechanism for our meat madness was the Glorious Gallaghers New York!!! … The small one in Las Vegas.

Same food, except the outside is really the inside of a casino, and building it probably cost ten times as much cuz you know, its Vegas.

Gallaghers New York is one of those old fashioned manly steak places. You know the kind where women weren’t even allowed in until last week… Dark wood everywhere, framed pictures of old pioneers and stuff on the walls and over the bar where they serve thirty different kinds of really old and terrible ancient 90 year-old scotch, presumably for the 90 year old men that eat here at the end of a long day of shooting other colonials with their muskets…

As manly as these places are, it’s totally my kind of place. And I feel very comfortable there. I like to order the rare porterhouse for two right after the waiter recommends the petit filet. It’s a good thing I’m not generally too excited about the veggies, cuz these had to all be ordered separately, except of course for the sprig of parsley that comes on the steak. That’s an unsightly blemish that needs removing in my opinion. The asparagus, a bit of potato, those are served all on the side and cost extra. Naturally, I didn’t bother.

Instead, we focused on the cow. And I like mine rare. Bloody rare, barely touched by human hands, I like to carve off what I want and ride the rest home. If the center of my steak is even partially warm, I send it back — so… rare. We had the boneless filet and the bone-in New York Strip. Both were cooked properly, with the right amount of flavorful sear and that awesome dry aged flavor we’re willing to pay through the nose for.

Of course no steak dinner at a hoity-toity steakhouse would be complete without the order of jumbo shrimp cocktail, and here the shrimp-zillas were firm and meaty, with a spicy cocktail sauce was just flaming enough to prompt the ordering of several more martinis — the girly kind of course, the bright green ones with the floating slices of apple that let all the burly men around you know you’re proud you’re not one of them. You’re better..you’re a meat-lovin’ mama!

Possibly, eating a hunk of barely cooked grass fed ruminant brings out the cave-woman in me, cuz I walked in hungry and meek, but walked out like I owned the place. Or that may have been because my dinner bill covered that month’s rent. It’s a pricey place. But you don’t eat here because it’s a good deal- you eat here because it’s Las Vegas. And Las Vegas is awesome, and being there makes you feel awesome too. The place makes you do things you’ll regret, eat things you’ll have to walk off, and take pictures that wind up getting shared instantly that will haunt you forever and ensure you’ll never see that next promotion.

Those Vegas restaurants really know how influential a San Diego Food Critic can be by the way, cuz after finding out who I was they really treated us well.  In fact, if you take a look at the photos you can tell.  See that one extra shrimp there on the side of that plate?  Yeah. I left Las Vegas proudly knowing that I had not only tackled my dinner of dry aged cow and won, but also that I had spent all my winnings on it. Well, nothing ventured nothing dry aged…