Well-done? Well, don’t

The faux pas of ordering steak overcooked

When Gordon Ramsay opened his $20-million fine-dining Maze Grill in Melbourne in 2010, he feted the usual coterie of industry professionals and food writers with a meal before his press day. An unusually guileful reporter, wishing to embarrass Ramsay on camera, confronted the vaunted chef and restaurateur with a photograph of the steak his companion had been unapologetically served at the grill just before — a withered, pathetic little clump of coal-black beef, desiccated and burnt beyond recognition. Was this culinary blunder, the reporter asked, up to Maze standards?

Ramsay was unruffled. And unsympathetic: it was the diner’s fault, he insisted, for ordering like an idiot. “How sad is this, that you asked for a steak to be cooked well-done,” Ramsay told the reporter. “Whatever quality of beef it is, it’s gone way past any form of taste when you’ve asked for it well-done. I don’t eat steak well-done. That’s your prerogative, because you’re the customer. But unfortunately, you’re never going to identify the quality of the beef when the steak is too well-cooked.” He concluded the interview flatly: “I’m sorry to piss on your bonfire, but it’s a bit of a stupid question.”

Earlier this week, another famed reality TV personality had a much-publicized and potentially embarrassing encounter with an overcooked steak: the President of the United States. Donald Trump dined last Saturday night at the palatial, Zagat-approved BLT Prime Steakhouse inside the Trump Tower in Washington and, according to an anonymous server — as told to Benny Johnson of the Independent Journal Review, eating at the same restaurant at a nearby table on the advice of a tipster — ordered an aged New York strip steak well-done. The culinary transgression did not end there: as if actively looking to humiliate himself further, the president enjoyed his blackened meat “with catsup, as he always does.”

There is a kind of perverse logic by which eating a welldone steak with ketchup makes sense: certainly the tough, tasteless, altogether unpleasant flavour of an overcooked hunk of New York strip could only be improved by a dollop of sauce, and why not ketchup, a sauce that’s wildly one-note and overpowering? And it is of course marvellously Trumplike in its line of reasoning: the bad taste ought to be obliterated rather than remedied or rectified, naturally. It’s a classic play. The man has devised an absurd solution to an unnecessary problem, a problem of his own invention.

At the risk of overstatement, you are, plainly and simply, sad(!) if you order a well-done steak. This is a universal (and widely known) bugbear of chefs the world over. Cooked to such a degree, as Ramsay explains, even the finest cut of beef is charred and blackened to tastelessness, making it impossible for a diner to appreciate that for which they’re paying.

Worse still, the discerning chef can scarcely hope to maintain kitchen standards: the well-done steak must cross the pass and hit the table in a form that is, by its very nature, substandard, unsatisfactory. The chef is resigned in such cases to sign off on an imperfect dish — because the imperfection is one the fan of the welldone steak wants.

A preference for a welldone steak — a taste for burnt food, for tough meat, for a bland and basically lousy meal — is, as Ramsay pointed out to the reporter, the prerogative of the customer who wants it that way. Every restaurant lives to serve, and a chef will cook a slab of beef to literal ash if that is what’s happily ordered.

But when you go to a restaurant you are, in an important sense, placing your trust in the expertise of someone more knowledgeable about food than you, and it behooves you as an intelligent diner to defer to that base of knowledge. To fight stubbornly against the advice of the person cooking for you — especially in a restaurant as acclaimed as BLT Prime, where Trump had his meal — is to betray your own pigheadedness. It’s to reveal yourself as a fool without taste or discernment.