I have a few friends of mine who have started up their own S&M; club. Now, to drag your mind out of the gutter, S&M; in this instance stands for “Steak & Mojitos”. Once a month these two couples select a steak house in DC and head out for an evening of fine dining. While the main purpose of the club is to spend some quality time together, there is a serious edge to the gatherings as each restaurant is graded in several different categories. A very sophisticated (and still secret) algorithm is applied to their individual rankings and used to compute an overall restaurant score. Prior to this past weekend, Charlie Palmer’s steak house was the lone restaurant visited by this crew and received a 73.9 rating. (Decimal points in the rating? Yes… told you it was sophisticated.)

Not wanting to invite myself into the club, but knowing that I a) enjoy these people’s company and b) enjoy a nice steak dinner from time to time, I half-jokingly offered my services as a guest reviewer to which they actually agreed. Woo-hoo! So this past Saturday, we met up at the Capital Grille for the official second meeting of the S&M; club.

I won’t bore you with the intricate details of the meal and the evening but a few quick thoughts along the lines of the categories used to rank the establishment…

• Appetizers – Excellent calamari. Clam Chowder soup was also quite good.
• Steak – When I’m at a nice restaurant, I always allow myself to get suckered in to the surf and turf… two petite filets with lobster. ($50, yikes!) Not amazing but still good. Meat was ordered medium rare and they delivered. No more or less taste then your standard filet.
• Mojitos – n/a… I went the way of a vodka martini.
• Sides – Very good mashed potatoes & cream spinach.
• Dessert – Meh. Probably my fault. I passed up Crème Brule for fruit.
• Atmosphere – A little noisy. A larger table for our party of five would have been nice.
• Service – While we had a very pleasant and polite waiter, service was a little slow. It took us quite a while to even get in an order of appetizers.
• Bathrooms – Very clean but an odd rumbling (broken fan? steak thieves tunneling in?) from behind one of the walls made for an annoyingly noisy experience.

I believe the final rating came in at a 71.9… a shade below Charlie Palmer’s. There are talks of an S&M; website/blog. I’ll be sure to share the address if that comes to fruition.