There is a steak in Spanish Harlem

In Jan­u­ary, I was vis­it­ing my brother Eric in the heart of West Harlem where he now lives when the steak crav­ing struck.

Only one year apart in age, my bro and I have sim­i­lar taste in food. In a nut­shell, we both like to eat. And on this par­tic­u­lar day, a hunk of red meat was the mutu­ally desired dish du jour.

Ensconced in front of the com­puter in his funky, vin­tage apart­ment, we perused a list of steak empo­ri­ums in and around his gritty, solidly Afro-American and His­panic neighbourhood.

Using my pretty reli­able restau­rant radar, by read­ing between the lines of sev­eral cus­tomer reviews and going by the eatery’s own claim — “Not your daddy’s old steak­house” — I got the mes­sage loud and clear: Get thee to Ricardo Steak House located at 2145 2nd Ave. about 25 blocks away in Span­ish Harlem.

A cab ride later, we had entered the medium-sized. wel­com­ing room under­stat­edly dec­o­rated in tra­di­tional steak­house style — shiny wood, mir­rors and can­dle­light — that, this early in the evening, was bustling and almost full.

With­out a reser­va­tion, we got a table for two and the fun began.

With online reviews as our guide, we ordered the porter­house steak for two with 3 veg­etable sides ($74).

Five strips of deli­cious gar­lic toast arrived gratis soon after and then came the steak with accompaniments.

Porter­house is basi­cally a huge T-bone, in this case about 2 inches thick. It includes the ten­der­loin on one side of the bone and the equiv­a­lent of a New York steak on the other.

Not only was the meat of top qual­ity, it was cooked to per­fec­tion — seared charred crusti­ness on the out­side and suc­cu­lently medium-rare on the inside, as ordered.

Creamed spinach, roasted baby spuds and grilled root veg­gies came in just the right amounts and were delectable.

Flan (creme caramel) for dessert was under­whelm­ing but who cared?

This was the steak repast of a life­time and is now my barom­e­ter for its genre.

I gather that ask­ing for a steak cooked by the Pitts­burgh method (also called “black and blue or Chicago-style) may be the answer. This method, so the story goes, dates back to days when work­ers in the city’s steel mills cooked steak with a weld­ing torch. A chef tells me you can also get this result at home using a red-hot cast-iron pan.

Or maybe I’ll just have to return to Harlem when the crav­ing strikes for a red-meat meal at sen­sa­tional Ricardo.

You can lis­ten to my pod­cast on the sub­ject here.