St. Anselm

Seasonal product at the grill

The decision starts with the cut, not the garnish. St. Anselm in Williamsburg, New York City works in a steakhouse language built around heat, seasoning, and restraint. The brief is modern but plain-spoken: seasonal ingredients, handled so the main ingredient remains legible, inside a room that asks food to be shared rather than staged.

The house publishes no kitchen lineage, so the reading has to come from the grill. This is a Brooklyn room with a taste for high-quality cuts and off-cuts, the kind of station where a hanger steak can carry the same seriousness as a larger chop. The lineage that matters on the plate is not ornamental. It is the hand that understands when to leave the meat alone, when to turn it, and when a side dish should support rather than compete.

Off-cuts, chops, and the shared table

St. Anselm’s menu is arranged around a la carte ordering and family-style passing, a structure that suits the kitchen’s best-known dishes. Butcher’s Steak, the hanger steak, sits at the center of the house vocabulary: a working cut, valued for flavor, asked to carry the meal without luxury theatre. Shoulder Blade Lamb Chop follows the same logic, with the bone and fat doing part of the work. The Bourbon-Brined Center-Cut Pork Chop brings time into the method before the meat reaches the fire, while Pan-Fried Mashed Potatoes with Truffle Oil gives the table a richer counterweight.

The wine program is curated rather than sprawling in description, built to sit beside char, salt, rendered fat, and the slight bitterness that comes from a grill used as a tool, not a backdrop. There is one award attached to the restaurant, but the more useful reading is on the pass: cuts chosen for character, sides that do not apologize for comfort, and a menu that keeps returning to the pleasure of meat cooked directly over heat.

Twelve tables and an open kitchen

The room keeps the work close. St. Anselm has 12 tables and bar seating, with an open kitchen that brings the pass into the sound of the dining room. Plates move through a lively, shoulder-to-shoulder space; the counter makes the grill visible, and the room answers with the low noise of a neighborhood steakhouse running at speed. Nothing about the setting asks for distance. The cook’s gesture, the lift of a pan, the wait for a chop to rest, all sit within view. Casual service suits that arrangement, because the place depends on proximity rather than polish. The room is cozy, but not hushed. It has the pressure of a grill at work and the looseness of a table passing food across elbows.

The dish that keeps the house honest

What matters here is the refusal to separate craft from appetite. The kitchen can take a less obvious cut and give it the attention usually reserved for a more expensive one, then send it into a room willing to share. If the next plate is the measure, the house already gives the test a name: Butcher’s Steak.