Morton's, Back Bay

After a long week at work, Bret and I decided to treat ourselves and kick off the weekend with a lovely date night at Morton's.  Bret and I have a goal to try out every steakhouse in the city and this would be our first time eating at Morton's.  After we both squeezed in our respective workouts, I was famished by the time we arrived for our 8:30 PM reservation.

To be honest, while our meal was wonderful and our service was pleasant, Morton's underwhelmed me.  The restaurant lacked all of the traditional steakhouse aesthetics and charm that I look forward to.  The formal service seemed awkward and stood out amidst the worn-out and tired decor of the restaurant.  It was a Friday night and the place was dead, which is something I've never seen at any steakhouse.  It just seemed like Bret and I came here two decades too late.

But the food?  The food was wonderful.  Bret and I somehow mustered the willpower to resist the gorgeous round onion bread to save room for the steak dinners that we had been looking forward to all day.  I took a few grainy photos of our meal.

To start, we decided to split the tuna tartare.  This dish was beautifully presented with a layer of diced tomatoes, diced avocado and diced tuna tossed in sesame seed oil and drizzled with balsamic vinegar and a spicy aioli.

While I can never really resist a tuna tartare, my only criticism of this dish is that the ratio was off.  The tartare could have eased up on the acidic tomatoes, which we left plenty of on the plate in the end, and added a bit more of the healthy fattiness of the avocado.

For our entrees, I went with the single cut filet mignon (8 oz.).  This tender piece of meat was cooked a beautiful medium rare with a seared crust on the outside.  While they have a double cut of the filet mignon, the single cut was enough for me and I still couldn't manage to finish it all!

Bret ordered the strip steak (20 oz.), which was also cooked a medium rare.  Even though there were smaller portions of this steak, Bret thought that he could finish this steak since he was famished.  He put in a more valiant fight than I did but still left quite a bit of steak on his plate in the end.

We both ordered our steaks au poivre.  At Morton's they don't offer a traditional au poivre and press the crushed peppercorns into the meat.  Instead, they offer a creamy peppery sauce.  While the sauce definitely had a fantastic peppery flavor, I still missed the intense pepper flavor and texture from a traditional au poivre preparation.

Our sides were simple but really delicious.  We couldn't resist the sauteed garlic green beans.  These crisp green beans was super garlicky, which in my book is a good thing!

And Bret and I always order sauteed mushrooms with our steak dinners.  There were several options at Morton's but we decided to go with the sauteed button mushrooms and onions.  This was the perfect compliment to our steaks and I drizzled some of the flavorful juice from this side dish onto my steak.

All in all, it was a lovely steak dinner but I'm not sure that Morton's will make the list of my favorite steakhouses in Boston.

Morton's has multiple locations nationwide and two locations in Boston.  The Back Bay restaurant is located at 699 Boylston Street, Boston, MA.