I love dark restaurants. They are cozy and the darkness makes you feel like you and your friends or family are the only people in the restaurant. Add good service and a good meal and I never mind paying a little extra for the experience.
The Outback Steakhouse in Lewisville is dark inside, has good service, has great food, and is a little more expensive than I would like. But I eat there as often as I can anyway.
After being seated you are introduced to the only negative aspect of the entire experience. Your drinks. If you order tea, water, or a soda you will be served in what seems like tiny 10 oz. shot glasses. I've heard stories that Muslims make beautiful and near perfect rugs. However, on purpose, somewhere in the rug they will add a faded color or make a mistake in the pattern. This is to represent the fact that Allah is the only perfect being and all human works are flawed. Maybe the owner of Outback is Muslin. If they made the drinking glasses just a little larger, this would indeed be the perfect dining experience.
Next comes a warm loaf of pumpernickel bread along with some sweet butter. I can't do the bread justice. It's got an earth grainy taste that contrasts the sweet butter perfectly. But then you go to take a drink to wash down the bread and whammo....tiny glass.
The dinner salads are very nearly my favorite part of the dinner. The salad is always fresh. The croûtons are crispy but not hard. They are spiced with herbs and are quite literally the best croûtons on this planet. The cucumbers are cut in large chunks so my wife can take them out of her salad and give them to me. But the glorious ranch dressing is what holds the entire ensemble together. Good gosh.... it's a nice creamy ranch with a hint of something. It may be onion or it may be jalepeno. Whatever it is, that ingredient adds a bite to the salad that ties all of the ingredients mentioned above together. The lettuce and ranch and croûtons and cucumbers dance ever so softly on the pallet allowing you to taste each individually an as a whole. I love this salad. Add some black pepper and, like I used to say in middle school, it's on like donkey kong.
The steak has to live up to a salad that is beyond compare. I usually order the Outback Special with a loaded baked potato for two reasons. It is cheap and it is just as good as the salad. The O.S. is a sirloin cut that tastes like a New York strip. I've had both and I know. Please, trust me. The O.S. sirloin is juicy, flavorful, and tender. I add some A-1, just enough to add some spices to the bite, and I am in heaven. My wife and I end up ignoring each other for dozens of minutes as we dance separately through the cloudless skies of Texas with our steaks. The baked potato is covered in salt, stuffed like a pig in a farmers market after a tornado, and full of the same goodness as the salad and the steak.
The service is almost always exceptional and the waiters know their steaks. Glasses tend to stay full which helps to counter their tiny size. Waiters don't want to be my friend, they just do their job. That is always a plus. Food is brought out quickly and politely. Even the manager stops by about every third visit that I'm there, that's not too shabby.
I am a pretty big guy. I'm over 6 feet tall and I'm neither afraid nor ashamed to say that I usually cannot finish my entire meal at Outback. If I wasn't so distracted by the harmony of bread, salad potato, and meat I would have complained a thousand times about the small glasses that they taunt me with. Alas, you surely cannot find heaven on earth, but I swear sometimes that angels cook my steaks at Outback.
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