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CFP?
Posted on Sunday, May 18 @ 22:19:37 PDT
Topic: Chicken-fried Steak

I've eaten chicken-fried steak once or twice. I've also had occasion to partake of derivative dishes, such as chicken-fried chicken, buffalo, antelope, elk, lobster, bacon, and even ice cream. But perhaps the weirdest, most inspired riff on the dish that I've come across is CFP. On to the food...

"P" is for pastrami. Not the industrial-grade, plastic-wrapped, machine-sliced, fungible stuff found in most deli cases, but local, natural beef brisket, cured for five days, smoked on-site with oak for ten hours, steamed for three hours, and hand-sliced. It's glorious stuff, appearing in a number of dishes at Kenny & Zuke's Delicatessen in Portland, Oregon. ("Zuke" is Nick Zukin, aka ExtraMSG, a personal friend and longtime host of this web site.)

CFP doesn't show up on the menu at Kenny & Zuke's. Something about it being "non-traditional" for a Jewish deli. As an off-menu item, it can appear on its own or, as pictured above, on the "Texas Platter," along with a cup of goulash (as a faux chili), chopped pastrami and Swiss cheese fries, and a Reuben latke (i.e., latke topped with pastrami, Swiss, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing).

For the CFP, Kenny & Zuke's batters thick slices of pastrami and fries them in duck fat in a cast iron skillet. Sweet, salty, smoky, juicy, and crispy, it hits a lot of buttons. It's an evil, brilliant dish that should win its inventor some sort of prize.

Kenny & Zuke's takes a detail-oriented approach to everything they do. With a dedicated baker, they bake their own bagels, bialys, challah, rye, and an array of pastries. Bagels are hand-rolled (!), boiled in malted water, and baked throughout the day, so they're never stale. Outstanding bagels.

They bake their own buns for the happily ungainly pastrami burger. They grind and season the (local, natural) beef in house. They top it with thick, fatty slices of pastrami, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing. It's plated with house-made pickles and exceptionally crisp fries. I requested the burger medium rare and that's exactly how it arrived. Juicy rivulets streamed down the bun and over my fingers with the first bite through the nearly two-thirds pound of meat. Perfect.

Their soda collection is the most impressive I've seen in a restaurant. Over the course of several meals, I enjoyed several hard-to-find favorites (e.g., Jackson Hole's huckleberry and sarsaparilla, Bull Dog root beer, etc.) and some that were new to me (e.g., Crater Lake lemon-lime, Americana honey-lime ginger ale, Jackson Hole strawberry-rhubarb, Manhattan Special sarsaparilla). Check out the soda list here (and scroll down for the beers).

Another off-menu treat...pastrami burnt ends. If that picture doesn't make you drool, you've come to the wrong web site.

I've posted more photos in a Flickr slideshow here. Kenny & Zuke's represents the sort of overachieving mid-range restaurant that's common in Portland, yet almost unheard of in Dallas.