A blast from the past – Louis Steak House

A friend from the FCC had recommended Louis Steak House to us as somewhere to get a decent steak but without all the expense and poshness of Morton’s or Ruth’s Chris. So after Orpheus X, Mrs smog and I decided to try it out on Sunday.

We didn’t really know what sort of place to expect when we arrived. What we found was quite a large room furnished in dark wood (not unlike how I remember Jimmy’s Kitchen when last I visited a while ago), peopled by almost as many staff as customers. Everything about the place has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it, including the staff, who were all apparently locals, many of them older but with excellent English. We selected a booth by the window looking over Gloucester Road, despite the waiter in the inimitable Hong Kong style suggesting quite directly that my beer gut might be too large to fit! (It wasn’t.)

The menus contains exactly what you would expect from a western steakhouse of years gone by: starters of prawn cocktail, French onion soup and so on, priced around $60-$90; a page of various types of steak priced at $220-$280, plus some other grills and seafood dishes. The wine list was somewhat unusual being in the form simply of labels from the bottles presented in a photo album without any further description except the price.

Mrs smog chose the prawn cocktail followed by the surf & turf, requesting medium rare on the steak and making a point of asking for the king prawn to be very well cooked. I went for the French onion soup and the “steak de Louis” which was a filet mignon wrapped in bacon and topped with a pat of butter and pate, ordered rare. A basket of apparently fresh French bread and plenty of mini-Lurpaks arrived immediately.

From the wine list I decided to splash out a little an selected a 2003 Gigondas at $660, which wasn’t the best choice in retrospect because it needed time to open up and the service was so prompt that it was only just starting to drink well as we finished the steaks. There are other wines available from about $320, up to the almost ubiquitous Chateau Lynch-Bages.

The food arrived very promptly indeed, and the starters were exactly what I would have expected: old style prawn cocktail, with a tomato sauce and lemon juice offered separately by the waiter; French onion soup that was fine but no more.

Almost immediately the starters had gone the mains arrived. And the steaks were, as promised by our friend, pretty good. Not up there with Morton’s, but better than at most other places in Hong Kong in the $250-300 price range. Unlike places like Wooloomooloo (which also does a very good steak) the side dishes are included in the price – on Sunday we were offered jacket potatoes (served with sour cream, bacon bits and spring onions if desired), baby carrots and broccoli, all of which we were fine with so we didn’t test if other options were available. The vegetables were simply (and not quite over-) done, the steaks came with a mushroom sauce, mustard was offered and horseradish appeared on request.

To finish we decided to see what they could do with a chocolate soufflé ($80 for a minimum order of two) . This was rather a disappointment, being too leathery, not as light and somehow altogether less good than the excellent soufflés we are used to from the FCC.

But overall if you are looking for a bit of a 70s nostalgia trip in Wanchai with a decent steak and very attentive service at a price that’s not too bad then you could do a lot worse than Louis Steak House. They also do a 3-course weekday set lunch including some sort of steak for, I think, $88+10% which would be a cheaper way to try the place.

The bill overall came to about $850 for two starters, two steaks, two soufflés, two small bottles of Perrier and 10% service. Plus $726 (including service) for the wine.

Louis Steak House
1/F Malaysia Building
50 Gloucester Road
Wanchai
Tel: 2529 8933