What is a steak dinner without sides? Once you’ve cut into your wet-aged New York strip au poivre, you turn to the extras. Those pretty plates, the individual-portion cast-iron skillets and oval dishes hold gratinéed potatoes and luxurious mac and cheese in a dozen varieties that don’t shy away from primo ingredients like lobster. Things get fancy with petals of shaved truffle or silky aligot potatoes. A side is not merely a side.
The dishes at the top steakhouses deserve credit for the supporting roles they play. For SER Steak + Spirits’ Broken Baker, a slipper of baked potato is fried, artfully smashed, and topped with an avalanche of crispy lamb bacon, crème fraiche, and throwback dollops of pimento cheese. It’s a bodacious, upscale take that had me name it, in my research for our 10 Best Steakhouses in Dallas story, the best baked potato in Dallas.
Other top picks for sides to compulsively devour:
- The elotes at Town Hearth—Nick Badovinus chars the corn in the husk, them loads it with crema, cotija, and espelette pepper.
- French beans with ginger butter at The Capital Grille—The secret sweetness of ginger melds with snappy beans and silky roasted heirloom tomatoes.
- Roasted hen-of-the-woods mushrooms at CBD Provisions—A forager motif runs through this triumph of simple woodsy fungi with fines herbes.
- Smoked Gouda tater tots at Ocean Prime—Pop-in-your-mouth decadence that makes you feel eight years old again.
- Lobster mac and cheese at Nick & Sam’s Steakhouse—Lobster butter three ways: in the béchamel, the bread crumbs, and tossed with the lobster meat and aged white cheddar. They don’t play down decadence.
