Restaurants
Buttoned-down bankers and tie-less creatives converge downtown
R. Norman's and 7 Sushi Lounge: work it
The meat downstairs at R. Norman's, which consists mostly of steaks and grilled fish, sticks closely to the standard chophouse formula. The most expensive items on the menu seem more for showing status than delivering a return on the dollar. Kobe steak may be the most tender type of beef, but was it worth $9 a bite? Probably not, especially compared to the tasty R. Norman's fillet, topped with lump crab meat and honey-bourbon sauce. The macaroni and cheese can be ordered with truffle oil (which our waitress described as being "like, the new hot condiment"), but it would have been better without its overpowering muskiness. The worst high-priced offender was the Australian cold-water lobster tail. The meat was tasty, sure, but delicious enough to make my four-bite share worth $25? No.
Yet a number of mid-priced items make R. Norman's a serviceable business-lunch spot. I tried a range of dishes, from a homey side of green bean casserole (as thick and gooey as grandma's) to a more experimental blackened scallops entrée served with papaya-cilantro butter and barbecue corn relish, and, after all that, found that the salads were what I'd order again. The Houston is straightforward—bacon, cheese, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, and honey-mustard dressing—but exactly what it should be, as is the R. Norman's, topped with beef tenderloin, tomatoes, and a generous portion of blue cheese crumbles. Some of the other items could have used more attention: The ribs were dry, the grilled tuna steak sandwich was eclipsed by its bun, and the burger, when ordered medium, came charred to a crisp on one side.
While the dessert menu offers all manner of classic spiked ice cream drinks, molten chocolate cake, and bread pudding, the best treat is the bananas Foster. Upon order, a cook wheels out a cart equipped with a lit gas burner, heats a sauté pan, and then loads it with butter and brown sugar (a painfully transparent reminder of the high-cal content of restaurant desserts). The cook adds sliced ripe bananas, dark rum, and banana liqueur, then ignites the mix in a spectacular flame. When it was served to my group, we almost started clapping.
A more striking contrast than the R. Norman's and 7 old-money/new-money dichotomy may be the scenes of wealth and poverty on either side of the restaurants' window glass. R. Norman's dining room looks directly out at bus stops whose routes serve the poorest parts of the city. (During lunch one day I was a bit spooked by a guy in a hooded skeleton sweatshirt and a skull mask who walked past.) But from 7, just two floors up, the same view becomes far more glamorous. Shrouded in spotlights and night sky, Block E—which I consider the ugliest piece of architecture in the city—somehow transitions from gaudy to glitzy in a Las Vegas sort of way.
As I stepped out of R. Norman's one night and watched a guy pee on the side of the Block E building, I had to bless the Bellanotte boys for investing in the block. Others may have balked at the blight, the cheesiness of GameWorks, the seediness of the Skyway Lounge. But that's what a city is: a mix of everything and everyone. A place where you can spend $300 on dinner and have two people ask you for money as you walk to the car.
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