St Anselm

355 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

8.1

map & more

Neighborhood
Brooklyn
Williamsburg

Cuisine
American
Steaks

Nearby
Knitting Factory
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Union Pool

718-384-5054

Official Website

By Andrew Steinthal
September 21, 2011

Tweets, emails and phone calls have been coming in fast and furious recently, demanding we get to St. Anselm immediately. When the Infatuation Nation speaks, we listen. Same goes for The Underground Gourmet, one of our most trusted sources, who have raved about this place. Even though it’s only been open for a couple months, it feels like we’re kind of late to the party on this one.

Damn Good Steaks aren’t just appealing to Midtown Suits. We might rock skinny jeans and bad ass sneakers, but Hipsters love a good cut of red meat just as much as anyone. We’re not all wussy vegans, thank you very much. St. Anselm is a new Williamsburg grill parlor opened by the same crew behind Infatuation approved BBQ joint Fette Sau and Spyten Dyvel, the beloved beer bar next door. They’ve transformed the corner of Metropolitan and Havemeyer into quite the culinary destination. These guys understand how to create an environment conducive to high quality hanging out, aided by delicious, sharable eats, carefully crafted booze choices and good taste in music.

St. Anselm might look like a bar from the outside, but the reason you’re coming here immediately has nothing to do with their vast selection of half bottles of wine (of which, the first two I asked for were sold out) or the service (which wasn’t very good), and everything to do with the Butchers Steak and Pan-Fried Mashed Potatoes. Wow. It’s that good. Nothing else we had was equally mind-blowing, but overall the food was definitely impressive and reasonably affordable for the quality. Go with friends and be prepared to share. We didn’t have the balls to order the head-on baby chicken, but if you do, please Tweet a photo our way.

Bottom Line: throwing a bunch of meat on the grill is never a bad idea. It may be simple, but simple food can sometimes be the hardest to pull off. Saying that St. Anselm nailed the Butchers Cut steak would be a tremendous understatement. They absolutely destroyed it.

Photo Credit: Katie Sokoler/Gothamist

Food Rundown:

Pan-Fried Mashed Potatoes
This could be the best potato dish that exists in NYC. Holy sh*t, this is nuts. The mashed potatoes are cooked with truffle oil and pan fried, resulting in a crispy outer layer, but deliciously mushy and moist in the middle. A win in both the texture and taste departments.

Bib Lettuce with shallot vinaigrette
We needed some green to balance out all the meat we had ordered, and it turned out that this bibb salad was really damn good. The shallot vinaigrette dressing was also tasty.

Spinach Gratin
Nothing crazy out of the ordinary, but you can’t go wrong with a well executed side of spinach.

Shishito Peppers
We’re spoiled. We’ve been eating South Edison’s shishito’s all summer and these don’t match up.They were just a little too lemon zesty for our liking.

Saddle (London Chop)
Outstanding. This ranks right up there with just about any lamb chop I’ve ever had. The pieces of meat literally melted in your mouth. The mint yogurt seemed a little weird in theory, but it actually worked quite well, and added some extra flair to the big chunk of meat. Definitely order this.

Butchers Steak
Think about that celebrity piece of meat you want a slice of really really badly. For pretty much every girl on the planet, that’d be Ryan Gosling right about now. This heavenly cut of meat is that person, only in the form of an actual piece of beef. It’s that good looking. Perfection, actually. This medium-rare hanger steak is soaked in butter and garlic, and is the main attraction here at St. Anselm. Order and go home happy.

Bourbon Brined Center Cut Chop
The pork chop was the most disappointing dish of the night. It was 60% fat, a little chewy and overall just not that much fun to eat. Finding a really good piece to took a lot of work, and wasn’t worth the time commitment. You can do better.

Whole Trout
We couldn’t find it in our hearts to order any fish here. It just seemed like a crime with all that good meat on the menu. However, we’ve had a couple of people on Twitter call out the whole trout, and we will do our best to fight our instincts and order it next time we come through.

Dessert
We had some strawberries and marshmallow thing that sounded interesting on paper, but was really quite bad in reality. Order another Butcher Cut instead.