What’s the best part about eating a steak? If you said under your breath, the steak sauce, you’re exceptionally bright.

I should admit I rarely eat steak, that is, I do it infrequently. Like so many things that are over-priced, it’s overrated. And what makes it even worse is that most so-called fine steak restaurants in this country will charge you a hundred bucks for the steak (that’s what it will feel like) and then tell you how to eat it.

Welcome to the Communist Steakhouse.

“Excuse me, can we get some steak sauce?” … “Sorry sir, we don’t have any, but our steaks really don’t need it. We can get you some au jus though if you’d like?”

This little taste of communism – the unavailability of condiments and the insistence you eat your steak a certain way – has happened to me at multiple fancy meat establishments. It’s utter bullshit and a brisk kick to the balls for anyone who has chosen the saucy lifestyle.

The popular theory goes that the people who own these hipster Sizzlers think the steaks are so perfectly cooked that applying sauce to them, seasoning them to your own personal taste, would be sacrilege. In fact, the cooks take offense to the notion. Yep, the prima donna barbequers are insulted by A1 and Worcestershire Sauce hurts their feelings. You can have salt and pepper, but nothing saucy. It’s fuckin’ condiment discrimination. You can have ketchup for your fries, the fuckin’ $1.25 spuds you can eat the way you want, just not the million-dollar steak.

If the steak place wants to pontificate about how to eat a steak, maybe going so far as writing a paragraph or two and placing it on their menu, that’s fine. If people wanna call themselves steak-eating purists and advocate for eating naked steak, that’s fine too … stupid, but okay with me. I’m even cool with knuckleheads saying that steak sauce and the like ruins the taste of steak, even though we all know that some kind of sauce is the only thing that gives steak any taste at all.

What I’m NOT okay with is some restaurant owner telling a paying customer how he’s allowed to consume his meal.

♦

The last time I ate steak at one of these joints associated with the Communist Party I took in my own condiments, Valentina Hot Sauce and A1. They were smuggled in using a woman’s handbag. If I had been born in Moscow or Ukraine such a desperate maneuver may have been risky, but I’m American so I viewed it as an act taken in the name of liberty, a defiant blow struck for every meat-eater who believes in freedom.

They serve the little steak on a huge fuckin’ plate, like it’s some fuckin’ rock star alone in the spotlight at the Hollywood Bowl. There’s nothing else on the plate because the egomaniacal chef wants everyone to know that the slab of cow flesh is really a fuckin’ work of art. Anyway, I waste little time pulling the sauces from my purse, and in a few seconds, the almost-empty plate has two good-sized ponds of the saucy deliciousness that make every steak better.

If seen from space my sauce pools looked like conspicuous oil slicks on an otherwise pristine ocean. As such, our waiter was quick to notice. “Did you bring in your own condiments?” he asked.

“Damn right … And I’m gonna start passing ’em around from table to table!”

To think that any food could be cooked with such precision that it wouldn’t need some sort of condiment, something to fuckin’ dip it in, is simply delusional. For a steak or an egg or a guppy or a chicken wing or anything else, that form of cooking doesn’t exist.

“This bread and this peanut butter are so good, you don’t need jelly.”
“I boiled this pasta so perfectly, people wanna eat it all by itself.”
“This cow was slaughtered and cut up and hung in a meat locker and burnt over a flame with such meticulous awesomeness, no additional ingredient can improve upon it.”

Fuck that! I paid my fuckin’ money and I’ll decide what’s fuckin’ delicious for myself.

For something to taste good it all depends on what you do to it – i.e., what you pour on it – after it’s cooked. Condiments are pretty much the best part of any meal and if you can’t get seventy-three dipping sauces, bring your own. Or better yet, just pass entirely on fancy shit like steak and make your dining choices based only on whether the establishment respects your rights, and it will be plain to see because American freedom looks like free-flowing A1 and Tabasco and barbecue sauce.