Tony Bourdain’s Hanger Steak

I’ve done about 500 focus groups in my life. They all blend together at some point. I’m “unconsciously competent” at qualitative research, and while the lessons are distinct, the details of where and when I learned them tend to blur together.

Some of these nights in front of the mirror do stand out, however. I remember very clearly an evening very close to the twilight of the 90’s, when I was doing focus groups for New York City’s Z-100 — at the time, the radio station with the largest weekly audience in America. I was staying in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, near the focus group facility, and on my free night in the city I wandered around looking for a place to have dinner. I stumbled into Les Halles, on Park Avenue. It looked busy, which was a good sign, and there was a seat at the bar. I took it.

From several years of working in France, the menu was not unfamiliar to me. Good, simple, bistro fare. I asked the bartender what he would recommend. Without hesitation, he said, “the hanger steak.” I’d never had hanger steak. Honestly, having just crested 30 years of age, my culinary palette was fairly limited. But he seemed passionate about the dish. He asked me how I’d like it cooked. I’m normally a “medium” guy, which may surprise you not at all. But, unfamiliar with the cut, I asked the bartender to cook it as the chef would.

The chef, I learned later, was a pre-fame Tony Bourdain.

My hanger steak arrived, rare, as the chef recommended. I was not a “rare” person. But I tried it and squelched my initial impulse to send it back. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I’d never tasted anything like it. From that day on, hanger steak became my favorite cut of meat.

But over the years I’ve been disappointed by more hanger steaks than I can count. They are chewy, not fork-tender like their better-selling (though nearly flavorless) cousin the filet mignon. The hanger steak is also situated very close to the kidneys of a cow, and they have a very iron-rich flavor that is not as mainstream a flavor as the classic New York Strip. It’s an easy steak to ruin. Cook it a minute past medium rare and it stops being steak and becomes a hank of rope.

But the hanger steak I had that night in Les Halles was not a hank of rope. It was blackened and delicious on the outside, rare, tender and juicy on the inside. 20 years of trying to cook that myself, and I’ve never come close to that. Yet Les Halles served dozens of these a day, and nailed them. Every time. The more crappy hanger steaks I made at home, the more I marveled at the technique Bourdain’s kitchen displayed with this humble cut of meat — “the butcher’s steak.”

Properly cooking this cut requires a few traits. One is surely “audacity,” which Bourdain would have probably called “balls.” It’s an easy dish to fuck up. One would surely be precision. You’ve got about a minute’s play between delicious and leather with a hanger steak. And the final trait, surely, is pride. Not every hanger steak that kitchen cooked was great. But every one they sent out was.

If you worked for Bourdain, you gave a shit.

Audacity, Precision, Pride. That’s a North Star, friends.