BUFFALO STEAK HOUSE

Located at the end of Emek Refaim, this glatt kosher steak house is a most welcome addition to fine dining in Jerusalem. They do meat, and they do meat exceptionally well.

We first ate at Buffalo back during Thanksgiving week. The place was mobbed. The food was excellent, but the service was excruciatingly bad! Things did not get to the table. Things that did were not what we ordered. Food came cold when it finally arrived and almost none of it was prepared the way we requested.

We are pleased to note that they seem to have worked out all the kinks! We were there on Feb 3, 2008 for a birthday celebration. There were five of us. The service was attentive, patient, caring, and all around excellent. The food was phenomenal.

We shared appetizers and ordered for the table: carpaccio, eggplant biladi, onion rings, dipping bread with various sauces and lamb kabobs.

The carpaccio was perfect: tissue thin slices of marinated meat (but otherwise raw) that melted in your mouth. The eggplant was a perfect mix of tastes that all seemed to complement each other. The bread was incredible. The kabobs were perfect- spiced just right! The only discordant note was the onion rings. They were tissue thin and appeared to be merely fried breading with nothing inside. They had no onion taste at all. Frankly, the onion rings were a waste of our money and the chef’s time!

For dinner, two of us shared a two pound entrecote. One of us had chicken. Two of us each had filet mignon. In Israel, they do kosher rear quarter meat, so the filet mignon is really filet mignon. As rear quarter meat is slightly sweet, the meat was incredible. It was soft as butter!! (Or should we say pareve margarine??) Cooked to perfection and served with pepper corns in a slightly sweet sauce. Taam gan eden for sure!! Main courses come with salad and a side dish. We all had salad (duh) and four of us had chips (french fries) and one of us had pureed potato (a baked potato that had been through a food processor). The chips, by the way, were perfect. Seasoned just right and cooked just the right amount of time.

Typically of Israeli restaurants, if you want ice you have to ask for it, so water is served directly from the tap. Soda comes in a tiny bottle with an empty glass.

We did not have any wine nor any dessert. Dinner,with tip, came to NIS 800 (about $50 per person). The filet is the most expensive item on the menu gram for gram and weighs in at about 200 grams.

We would definitely go there again. The food is excellent and the service, finally, is truly grand. Other than the onion rings, our only complaint is that the place is very noisy and having a conversation can be most difficult. For those of us who are old and suffer a hearing loss due to too much rock and roll (etc) back in the sixties, conversation there can be difficult. Even when we were the next to last table to leave, we found it very hard to hear each other. Oh well. No place is perfect, but Buffalo comes close.