Corrigan's Steak House (Dan)

Friends:

So you want some "atmosphere" with your steak dinner?

We have a place for you, in spades.

Scott, Gregg and I decided to go to Corrigan's Steak House a couple of weeks ago for our tri-monthly food review outing and to otherwise get back to nature and experience the local Thousand Oaks flavor. We got an ass full of that with some to spare.

Corrigans is a legendary steakhouse on Thousand Oaks Blvd. and it's been there forever and is now probably circling the drain. The place, apparently,is named after an old stuntman in old Westerns named "Corrigan". Corrigan is dead and gone now but his son Tom still runs the place, 10 gallon hat and all, and he basically sits at the bar and gets hammered drunk on Wild Turkey and barks out orders. So you can pretty much fill in the gaps on all the decor in the place. Guns and antlers on the walls, old western movie posters, wagon wheels dangling perilously from the ceiling, old televisions stacked on other old televisions with extension cords strung like tripwire, winos and miscreants sitting at the bar, the whole bit. This place is all about locals and making sure they get their drink on by 6:30 a.m., which is opening time for the bar, as deftly noticed by Scott upon first glance at the menu.

So I arrive early via designated driver and take a seat at the bar. The bartender was nice enough but clearly she's an enabler to all the world class alcoholics who frequent this place. She's serving drinks, running the football pool, stirring the Crockpot full of polish sausage on the bar (help yourself) and handling all the other extracurricular activities behind the bar. She's skilled. The three chuckleheads at the bar next to me are already completely heated by 5 PM and are having a drunken conversation about Chardonnay. These guys obviously just came from hanging drywall somewhere, yet they're talking about their favorite Chardonnays. I'm intrigued and I wonder if they know Gregg. For good measure, they're giving me the stinkeye and then they start in with the racial jokes. Now I'm scared, and I'm not even close to being the target of their jokes. I text Gregg and ask for his ETA. I'm going to need some backup here. In the meantime, Tom the owner is at the other end of the bar, with his big ass hat, talking on the telephone to a guy who he apparently wants to hire as kitchen help, but doesn't speak English. So Tom is speaking loudly into the telephone, conducting restaurant business right out in the open, and doing his best "No hablo" thing and trying to communicate to this guy to show up the next day to start work. How desperate was that guy for a job? Who the hell is running the kitchen right now?

In the meantime, we're now in prime dinner hour and the entire restaurant is empty. I'm talking crickets. The place seats about 100 people and there's NOBODY there, except the assholes at the bar. What is this place trying to tell me?

Then I notice that the banquet room adjacent to the bar is empty, but 4 guys go in and start setting up a card game. These guys looked like middle aged doctors and it was obvious that we were now interrupting their weekly card game (with money changing hands) right there in the bar. These guys were all business and, in all honesty, I'm kinda jealous. They picked a perfect venue for a weekly card game and clearly had a tradition going. These guys were going to get hassled by nobody in this place.

Gregg and Scott finally arrive and our waiter makes a big production out of giving us the best seat in the house, which is next to the broken fireplace under the dangerously dangling wagon wheel.

The waiter was absolutely priceless. A very sweet guy who was trying very hard and actually did a pretty good job but was totally distracting. Imagine Herve Villechaize but about two feet taller. Same goofy accent and fucked up teeth and the whole deal. We asked him to run down the specials for us and the guy went on a filibuster for about 5 minutes. He knocked out all the specials from memory, and I'm talking about a LONG list of specials. He actually started to sweat about half way through. He nailed it though, and we were impressed. This guy was dedicated and I have to say he was definitely an overachiever in this place. He even put a "reserved" placard on our table for crying out loud. Reserved for what?

So then Scott starts working the menu. He's all over it and no stone is going unturned. In the end, however, it looks like it's going to be standard ribeyes all the way around for this dance. Done. Gregg and Scott are going with onions, thank you very much, and go ahead and deliver some onions on the side, just in case of emergency. Done and done. Baked potato? Sure. And bring all the fixins with that. Garlic bread and another cocktail? Absolutely, my good man, and keep 'em comin'. How about a side of chili with your steak, Mr. Akemon? Fuckin' A. Bring it. We're definitely warming up to this place. So then the food comes out, and it's spectacular. The attached photos speak for themselves, so let your eyes do the tasting. This place was old school, with the butter, sour cream, and chive carousel right there at our fingertips. Go ahead and help yourself and there's not WAY you can hurt it. When's the last time you saw the baked potato fixins carousel? Didn't that used to be standard circa Hungry Hunger and Velvet Turtle? What the hell? And by the way, the chili on the side was pure ambrosia. In the end, I don't want to even know what the kitchen in this place looks like, given the way the dining room looks, but there is some magic going on back there and it was sprinkled all over this meal.

We wrapped up dinner with another cocktail and group dessert and headed for the door. That's when the waiter really started to sweat because there was some sort of foul up on his tip and we walked out without paying him. That guy worked his ass off and we almost stiffed him. We were his only table that night (seriously) and then we were going to stiff him? His whole family was probably counting on that tip to live. I don't know how many of his family members it would take to kill us, but I know how many they were going to use. Dying in the parking lot would actually have been an interesting ending to this tale.

But no. Instead, we piled into Gregg's new Mustang, dropped the top down, threw our capes around our necks, bid Corrigans adieu, and roared away into the night and into a blissful steak haze. But first we had to stop for smokes.

/da








Follow up:

I went in expecting a 6ish experience.I left feeling it was 8ish, I quite enjoyed myself. There's a place for Corrigan's in our lives, I'm just not sure I know where. Yet.Honorable mention goes out to the Cowboy Beans (done correctly) which are a rare treat in today's dining arena. Oh and the lasagna dish of grilled onions they dialed up for Gregg. Man vs. Food material for sure.The 'scratching my head' award goes out to the Ulysses (our server) for showing us the dessert tray and then serving our selections right from it. Really? That tray had been out...just sitting out on theeasel thing for longer than we'd been there. Can he do that? <> My spell check didn't even go off for this. Is that really a word?

Nice pull and nice job overall Dan. Bravo. - Scott