Catch Steak Opens a New LA Outpost in West Hollywood – Robb Report

When Catch Steak opens in West Hollywood on Monday, June 6, diners will discover ultra-premium American beef, hard-to-find Japanese Wagyu and loads of dishes for friends who don’t need to eat steak. And as all the time, Catch Hospitality Group co-founders Mark Birnbaum and Eugene Remm are contemplating three essential parts as they create a total-package restaurant.

“Meals, service and vibe,” Birnbaum says. “That’s what we expect Catch is. We repeat it on a regular basis.”

Catch Steak is a new-school steakhouse, the place meals don’t should weigh you down, the temper is festive, there are tableside displays with out pointless fussiness, and the standard of meals stays excessive regardless that the room may be a complete scene with celebrities, tastemaking influencers and massive teams of party-hearty friends who’ve numerous eating preferences. The bold restaurant will probably be open for dinner seven days per week, with hours from 5:30 pm to midnight.

“We could do 4 or 5, six, seven hundred covers, however we’re nonetheless doing all the pieces the correct means, the old-school sort of means,” says company chef Michael Vignola, who’s charbroiling tomahawks and porterhouses on Montague broilers that may get turned as much as 1,800 levels.

However Vignola stresses that the menu at Catch Steak (which additionally has areas in New York and Aspen) is constructed round smaller cuts, that are cooked on one-and-a-half-inch stable metal plates above the custom-fitted broilers.

“Catch is a very fashionable strategy to a traditional steakhouse,” Vignola says. ”We sort of acquired away from that old-school mentality of the large burly cuts which might be carved on a cart. All people actually focuses on what they’re placing of their our bodies now, and we perceive that. So if you happen to have a look at our menu, you’ll see smaller cuts. You’ll see the large-format cuts on the underside. However on our core menu, nothing’s actually over 12 ounces, and that’s actually the place we needed to stay. We actually consider we can provide you much less if we’re supplying you with the very best quality.”

Catch Steak has two butchers at Chicago-based provider Allen Brothers which might be hand-cutting beef for the restaurant.

“We’re solely shopping for prime beef and solely the highest 2 % of prime beef,” Vignola says. “Our meat is extraordinarily trimmed down. There’s no ancillary fats, no additional gristle. It’s actually centered and concise within the dimension and form.”

On the identical time, Vignola acknowledges the significance of the standard steakhouse flavors and textures which might be constructed round grain-fed, corn-finished beef.

“I actually needed that traditional old-school American mouthfeel that you simply get in an excellent steak,” he says.

For these craving one thing totally different, there’s a chili-rubbed grass-fed New York strip. Catch Steak additionally serves coveted Japanese cuts, together with snow beef from Hokkaido, olive-fed beef from Kagawa and true A5 Kobe beef from Hyogo, which will be ordered individually or as a flight of all three.

Non-steak choices embrace chilled seafood, Dover sole, mushroom-crusted salmon, sushi rolls, spicy baked clams, roasted langoustines, scorching shrimp, a soy-based vegetarian riff on rooster Parmesan (which each Vignola and Birnbaum extremely suggest) and sides like a twice-baked potato that may be topped with osetra caviar. Vignola enjoys being in Los Angeles, the place he can serve top-tier produce like California tomatoes that he pairs with Harry’s Berries strawberry jam.

Tableside theatrics embrace smoked cocktails that come out in lanterns, Wagyu scorching atop scorching rocks and baked Alaska that’s flambéed, after all.

For Birnbaum and his companions, together with steakhouse king Tillman Fertitta (whose eating places additionally embrace Mastro’s, Del Frisco’s, Morton’s and the Palm), the Catch model is about placing the correct ideas in probably the most optimum areas.

The seafood-focused Catch LA, for instance, opened on a chief perch above Melrose Avenue in 2016. “The house dictated us to do it,” Birnbaum says. “If that rooftop the place Catch LA is now wasn’t obtainable, I don’t know that we’d have ever come right here.”

Catch Steak’s West Hollywood location was born after Birnbaum acquired a name through the pandemic and realized that the sprawling Fig & Olive house on Melrose Place was obtainable. He already beloved the constructing, the two-story format and the gorgeous patio. After which he realized that there was an adjoining parking storage, which had been used as an occasion house, that was additionally obtainable.

“I’m like, wow, think about we rip the roof off this and make it a retractable roof like what Catch LA has, which everybody loves a lot and in addition, frankly, was a lifesaver throughout Covid as a result of it turned outside eating up there,” Birnbaum says.

So Catch Hospitality Group jumped on the alternative to create a high-ceilinged, Rockwell Group-designed steakhouse with 13,000 sq. toes of house, a street-facing patio, a backyard room, an indoor tree with lights on the heart of the restaurant and an extended entryway that may little question be featured in quite a few Instagram and TikTok posts.

“It’s just like the yin and yang of the entryways,“ Birnbaum says. “If the Catch LA or Catch Vegas or the Catch OG model is extra whimsical and floral and colourful, this can be a extra, say, subdued inexperienced and pure wooden entryway. It nonetheless offers you the earthy vibe, nevertheless it’s not as whimsical. I’d even perhaps name it extra refined, or the extra grown model of our model, the steakhouse.”