When people think of New York City, the major landmarks that they tend to think about are the Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park. When people think of food, iconic places like Katz Deli come up. But when we think of generic foods, we think of bagels and… on the higher end, steak. But does steak really need to be “high end”? Why do we need to have such a high price tag on what is really just another cut of of a cow?

So leave it to the people of Japan to come up with the idea of attempting to make steak more affordable by setting up Ikinari Steak years ago in Japan. To save on space and furniture costs, they initially created this as a ‘standing room only’ restaurant, where you would order your steak (served Japanese style, no less) and your sides, then eat it standing up, pay, and leave. It finally came to New York last year, and while the first couple of locations were kept as standing-only, they finally realized that here in New York, we’re too lazy to stand while eating, so they created a few locations (they’ve been expanding like crazy!) that actually have tables. So we took Chris’s parents to one of the sitting locations near Times Square today before our show, and we were shocked at how good it was given how little (relatively speaking, this is still New York) we paid.

This is definitely going to be a cheap-steak fix when we don’t want to pay Keen’s Steakhouse prices, or when I don’t want to deal with cooking sous-vide anything.