Dzien Dobry Glass Cube of Gentrified Warsaw. Out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dusty old…read moretrain tracks on one side and new, empty blocks of flats on the other, lies Le Haute Stek Haus. The entire complex is built from glass and more glass and a dash of rosy hopes for a future comprised of ladies with little dogs and fat pay checks, with glossy gold iPads and a banker commercialist financier partners.
On the horizen, skeletons of skyscrapers are being glued together day by day with the hard earned dollars of privateering tycoons and the sweat of underpaid construction workers. MMMM that smells good. Oh but wait what's that? It's an old communist style block of flats all orangey and decrepit. What an eyesore, but what a perfect foil. A cement reminder of times of lesser affluence, when not a single Porche was to be seen in Mokotow. Look how far we've come! Give yourself an old pat on the back.
Of course the scene comes complete with its own steak house. DUH. How else will the future tennets of this up-and-coming area feed themselves? It would be like Malibu Barbie without her hot pink convertable. Unfortunately, the menu is split pretty evenly between burgers and steaks - like rich people aren't bored with the burger bonanza like EVERYONE else. YAWN. So 2013. I'm not even willing to try a burger at a place like this. Why bother.
So moving on to the steak. The steak was prohibitively priced, but all steak in Warsaw is prohibitively priced. Let's put it this way - if I was willing to dish out the approximate 100 zlty it would take to get a steak and a beer in this town, I wouldn't mind doing it at a place like this. They look like the sort of establishment that sources the meat from the right place and would cook it properly, but I'm not Malibu Barbie. So I've got to skip the steak too.
So why did I venture out into this no man's land of newly gentrified Warszawian captalistism when Beef Be Beyond Me? They've got Pastrami sandwhichs. Spoiler Altert: They actually did not have Pastrami that day, so I was unable to try it. So here I was all dressed up with no meat to go. I ended up with a salad and a BLT in a STEAK house. I know. Here's a tissue.
The BLT at least was a double-decker affair with a wood stick and all on proper toast bread with good bacon - real American Diner Staple. The french fries were great, and the salad was middling. It had grapes, hot camembert cheese and a plum dressing so it was a bit too fruity for me. In general not bad. One intersting thing - they served Perla - Lublin Beer! I liked that. Also, they had a burger ala "Big Mac" - I'm not sure that's wise to use the quintessential burger brand of the quintessential global burger joint to peddle your own product. I'm just saying.
In the end the place was really no different from the similarly named Bydlo i Poidlo place - at least there they have burgers that flirt. Yet, the overwhelming impression one gets of the place is Gentrification with a capital "G". It blurs the lines of every other sensual stimulus. By the time I was getting ready to leave, I wanted the next generation Iphone and a late from Starbucks. It took me a little while to recover.
