BLT Steak in the Betsy Hotel on Ocean Drive is normally our go-to place for steaks in Miami. The tables for two on the outside deck are cute, the meat is normally incredibly tasty and their popovers are legendary. But something was just not working last night (a Monday, but the start of Passover) – for a Miami Beach stalwart that is always busy, they just seemed unable to cope with their patrons.
The wait was enormous, about an hour and twenty minutes between ordering and seeing our main courses (we skipped appetisers). That’s just unacceptable – I’m sure it was down to kitchen problems rather than serving – I think I went a good twenty-five minutes without seeing a plate of food pass by to any table. Just one person in our party had dessert, a plain lemon sorbet that took half an hour to arrive when the dining room was, by that time, largely empty (we’d paid the check long before it turned up). But the waiting staff didn’t exactly inspire confidence either: there were just two harried but competent servers for the main room, hindered by ten other guys with facial expressions ranging from glazed to stoned, intent on serving the wrong kind of water while steadfastly refusing to speak English. The two “hosts” wandering around asking tables if they were having a lovely time ignored us completely – no wonder, we were seriously pissed off by then and armed with steak knives.
So the food, finally. Well, you come here for the meat, everything else is ok to disappointing (apart from the popovers, which are lovely but disappoint you the morning after on the bathroom scales). The steaks (New York Strip, filets, Wagyu skirt) were very good indeed as always, even though the filet has got steadily more peppered and spiced recently (please stop that). Vegetables were horrible, conforming to that weird American way of serving them completely underdone but swimming in sauce, like sticking your face in an allotment in a melted butter downpour. The lemon sorbet tasted like vanilla flavoured with lemon oil.
All in all, if they’d served the food quickly and efficiently, I would have eaten my very enjoyable steak and shrugged my shoulders at the rest of the food as I normally do. BLT is a place to get a good fix of red meat and not get hung up about the details. But if they start drawing out that one far-from-perfect course over two hours… well, we’re going to look elsewhere for our steak needs. C’mon man…
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