While steak frites — and all steak-based dishes, really — tend to occupy the upper end of one’s budget, a new restaurant in Toronto is serving them for just $20, and no, there’s no catch.
French cuisine seems to be all the rage in Toronto these days. Restaurants like Cafe Renee and La Plume shot immediately to the top of the you-gotta-eat-here lists of many upon their openings last year, while standards like Le Select and Cafe Boulud remain super powers on the city’s culinary scene.
For me, though I have been known to down a plate of escargot in record time, French cuisine took a little warming up to. But what better gateway dish than steak frites?
Impeccably simple, the dish — which, as its name would suggest, consists typically solely of steak and frites — lends itself to total interpretation on the part of the chef.
At Sauvignon Bistro in the Beaches, the steak is smothered with Pommerey mustard and caramelized onions, while at Cote de Boeuf, you’ll receive your meat coated in a piquant peppercorn sauce. Always a little different, but always delicious.
At Tantxo Steak Bar, a new Waterworks Food Hall spot that is not a French restaurant at all, but Argentinian, it’s served with a generous helping of fresh chimichurri, alongside fresh shoestring fries and house-made aioli.
Tantxo Steak Bar’s Steak Frites are just $20 every Monday.
More crucially, though, they also offer it for just $20 every Monday, a price that even more affordable compatriots like J’s Steak Frites don’t come close to matching.
Melissa, a member of the team at Tantxo, tells blogTO that if you were to think that making a profit selling steak frites at that price would be impossible, you’d actually be absolutely right.
“In fact, with all the overhead that comes with running a restaurant, we’re definitely losing money on it,” she adds, but the decision to introduce the offer comes down to a simple reason.
“As a small business, we could spend money on ads, but instead, we’d rather invest in something real,” Melissa tells me, by which she means “getting people through the door, feeding them, and giving them a great experience.”
Steaks are cooked sous vide and finished on the grill.
The hope, Melissa says, is that in making the pricing of their offerings more accessible, more people will have the chance to try them out, tell their friends and come back for more.
“It’s an old-school approach, but it just feels right to us,” Melissa tells me.
The dish itself includes a sizeable 7oz strip loin sous vide and finished on the grill, paired with the aforementioned heaping serving of fries, chimichurri and house-made aioli. Bon appetit!
Beyond their Monday deal, Melissa says that Tantxo generally makes an effort to keep their prices as low as possible in order to maintain as much accessibility as they can in a time where, largely, quality dining is anything but.
“A great meal shouldn’t have to cost a fortune, and we’re working hard to keep the prices low without sacrificing the quality,” she says.
Tantxo Steak Bar at Waterworks Food Hall.
At a moment where the cost of living in Toronto seems insurmountably high, a restaurant that’s commited to keeping prices low is, though admittedly rare, a very special thing indeed — and even better if it comes with a side of fries.
Tantxo Steak Bar is located at 50 Brant Street.
