Since my wife and I moved to the Dallas area around 4 months ago we've been looking for good places to eat and trying to stay away from the big chain restaurants. My wife had driven past Randy's Steakhouse many times taking our daughter to dance class in Frisco. Randy's is situated on Main Street in Frisco in an old Victorian home. The restaurant doesn't look very big from the outside at all but actually has seven separate dining rooms including a full bar with Piano Lounge. We made reservations but they were a little backed up because of a couple large parties so we made our way to the bar to check out the scenery and get a couple of drinks. The ambiance and feel of the restaurant was great and had a perfect personal touch to everything.
At the bar I ordered a Glenfiditch (scotch) on the rocks and my wife Lori ordered a strawberry margarita. Their blender was broken so they could not make her drink a frozen margarita but, no big deal. Her drink turned out to be almost too sweet to drink and my scotch tasted like it had been sitting on the shelf longer than it was aged in the bottle...not a great start. But that's okay. It was our first date night in awhile and I was just going to let it go and enjoy the evening.
We were escorted to our table after only waiting for about 15 minutes. We were seated in the main dining room with a number of other couples and families. Our waiter greeted us promptly but we could not for the life of us understand what his name was and many of the specials he rattled off. We decided to start off with the Panko encrusted Brie with roasted garlic. Our appetizer came out and looked fairly appetizing other than the fact that some of the bread was a little burnt...again not a huge deal. We dove into the Brie having not eaten since breakfast and we were both disappointed. The Brie was amazingly bland and didn't taste much like Brie at all. The roasted garlic that I assumed was meant to be spread over the bread with the Brie would have been great, except it was not done enough and was very hard to spread. No biggie, some great restaurants focus more on their main dishes rather than their appetizers.
After mulling over some of the different seafood items, I decided to go with the ribeye. Lori, as usual, went with the filet. All side items were ala carte so we ordered the steamed asparagus, potatoes au gratin, and a side of Hollandaise sauce. It took a little bit longer than expected to get our entrees but they were busy. Our food finally arrived and they asked us to check our steaks for doneness. I ordered mine medium-rare and it was slightly overdone but not too much. Lori always has to have her meat well done so they normally have to butterfly her filets. They did butterfly her steak but it was underdone. Lori hates it when she has to send stuff back but when you're paying good money for expensive steaks, you really shouldn't have to apologize, or send items back for that matter. They apologized and put hers back on the fire and it came back out well done in a couple of minutes. My "hand cut" ribeye was much thinner than you'd normally see in a fine steak house and really didn't have much flavor at all. My wife's filet likewise was not very flavorful...reaching for the salt shaker. We dug into the potatoes, Hollandaise, and asparagus hoping for a reprieve from the blandness...denied! The potatoes were way too thickly cut and the cheese tasted like cheap cheddar and it was bland. The asparagus was ok, not that hard to screw up, but the Hollandaise was not that great. People seem to make Hollandaise way more difficult to produce than it really is. Their Hollandaise was overly thick and greasy and almost tasted like some of that cheap cheddar somehow made its way into the sauce. Nevertheless, we both used the sauce to cover up some of the blandness of our steaks...almost asked for ketchup.
Randy, the proprietor, was constantly helping out in the dining rooms and greeting all the guests. I whispered to my wife and said, "I really hope he doesn't come over here. I don't want to lie." Well, Randy was friendly and he did come over to our table...and I lied. I know I know. The culinary elf in my brain told me to tell him everything that was wrong, but I just didn't have the heart. This place has won a number of local awards so who knows, maybe they were just having an off night. I normally do not like to write negative things about people and/or places, but Randy's Steak House just didn't make the grade for us.
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