Their Steak Stands Alone

The glory of Bobo's snapped into focus with the arrival — hard upon the clearing of the first-course plates — of our meat. Or, in my case, meat and shellfish: I'd ordered the surf and turf, a petite filet mignon (truly petite, about four ounces) and half a crab, a tangle of legs dripping with garlic butter. My baby filet was meltingly soft, the crab quite nice, but I was much more beguiled by my friends' bone-in New York and bone-in filet mignon, cooked in a cast-iron pan with a "hint," as Bobo's says, of garlic and rosemary and then anointed with the pan juices, deglazed with white wine and butter. What a difference four to six weeks of dry aging makes, even to well-marbled prime beef. It's like the difference between a raw-milk cheese that's perfectly é point and a chalky pasteurized one.

We also shared, from a list of seven vegetable sides, a cheesy twice-baked potato straight out of a '50s Betty Crocker cookbook, of which we only tried one spoonful each; onion rings with a dense, too-thick coating; and, just to confound us, delicately fried circles of zucchini in a thin, crisp batter, served with a lemony basil aioli. The wine list is helpfully divided by price: $29, $39, and so on, and mostly American; the French bottles are few and stratospherically priced. The list yielded a nice, soft $39 petite syrah from Ojai, which we chose ourselves after a request for help — something "in the French style, non-oaky" — from our kinda-clueless server yielded a suggestion of exactly what we didn't want.

After washing down the extravagant meat with good red wine, we didn't really need anything else. But we shared a confection called clown caps: four small waffle cones filled with chocolate mousse and propped on a lattice of chocolate sauce amped up with ancho chile — a little silly, a little messy.

Bobo's is far from my dream steakhouse. But it does serve dreamy steaks.