Beef Connection, Gretna, LA Report #231

If you’re looking for this place at night, look hard, because that sign doesn’t light up.  Or if it does, it wasn’t lit up tonight.

When you see this place it just strikes you how plain it is.  No ornate decorations or anything.  It’s just a simple, no nonsense, steakhouse, and that’s good enough for me.  I’m all about the food.

We decided on a cup of chicken and sausage gumbo and a shrimp cocktail for appetizers.  For our steak we chose to split the 16oz Porterhouse, and got the Lyonnaise potatoes and broccoli au gratin for our sides.

The food:

Instead of a basket of bread they start you out here with softened butter and crackers.  Melba toast and Club crackers.  But later, when they brought the food out, they brought a basket of room temperature French bread.  So if you prefer that to start with, no harm in requesting it.    I was happy with the crackers.  I must have eaten a half of stick of butter though.

The gumbo had a nice dark roux, which I love.  I thought it was great the way it was, but my dining partner felt it lacked seasoning.  She added a little salt to it and thought it was good.

Back to being a plain, no nonsense place.  Who needs a fancy little stemmed glass to serve a shrimp cocktail?  Here, they just slap it in a bowl.  7 large shrimp in a yummy, horseradishy cocktail sauce.

The steak was very good.  Cooked to the doneness we requested, very tender and juicy.  The waitress offered, and we asked them to split it in the kitchen.  Apparently they forgot.  No problem.  We just split it up ourselves at the table.  Luckily, the waitress set the very hot plate down in front of me.  It was so hot my dining partner couldn’t reach out and snatch it away, so I got to split it. That prevented her from stealing a bigger piece, which I KNOW would have happened!  I did it fairly, of course.

As far as the sides, I imagined the broccoli would be chopped up a lot smaller, maybe have been in a creamy sauce, with cheese and breadcrumbs on top, then browned under a broiler.  That’s broccoli au gratin in my brain.  But no.  It was just large broccoli florets with a bunch of melted cheese.  Not bad, just not what I expected.

When the waitress put the Lyonnaise potatoes on the table she said they looked like they could be browned more.  She told us to try them and see what we thought.  We did, and agreed.  So she brought them back to the kitchen and they browned them a little more.  Made all the difference in the world.  Pretty good side dish.

Nice place for a steak.  Especially if you plan on dining on the Westbank.

501 Gretna Blvd., Gretna, LA  70053  Ph: 504-366-3275

Blaine 9-13-2019