“We said we need a steakhouse because anytime we wanted to do something we had to go all the way to Legacy,” Rainwater said.
On the menu
Rainwater said the top two selling lunch menu items are hamburgers and the prime rib sandwich.
“Our burgers are hand-ground and are a dry age blend,” Rainwater said. “They're 60/40 fat-to-lean ratio, so it's something that you don't normally get at a lot of places.”
The dinner menu boasts a variety of steak options including wagyu filet, wagyu ribeye and wagyu New York strip, but Rainwater said he can almost always predict the top seller every evening.
“It doesn’t matter what we put on the menu, the majority of the time, they’re going to choose the most expensive steak we have,” Rainwater said. “When people come here and spend the money on these dinners, they do it because it's the best. I’m the same way.”
The process
Meat, prior to being served at BAR-Ranch Steak Company, has been aged in the on-site custom aging room, complete with a Himalayan salt wall. Aging times vary from eight to 400 days.
“To me, Himalayan salt doesn’t make a huge difference in flavor, it’s more or less there to purify the air,” Rainwater said. “The constant air flow around the blocks helps keep the bacteria in check along with the moisture.”
What you need to know
Customers are not given an option on how they want their steak cooked. Rainwater said all their meat is served at 135-degrees, which is medium-rare.
“In my opinion, if you say ‘medium’ or ‘medium rare’ they [customers] don’t have a thermometer out here, they just look at it—so that's subjective, their opinion,” Rainwater said. “Everything is [cooked] over a wood fire grill so anything higher could burn the steak. This puts a heavy char on it which is what we like.”
Rainwater said he asks customers to trust him on this and thus far has received a 90-percent approval rating.
“I tell people when I come to the table, ‘Do it our way.’ That way if you don’t like it, it's my fault. If I do it your way and you still don’t like it, it's still my fault,” Rainwater said. “Even people who say they don’t like medium-rare steak, most of the time it's because they don’t want to see the blood on their plate, they won’t see that with our steaks.”
Quote of note
Rainwater said he never thought he’d be waiting tables when he was 52 years old but one of his favorite things about owning this business is talking to customers about steak. He said every customer who comes in is his touching customer story, not only because their patronage keeps the doors open, but because of the consistent reactions.
“We get to share something with them that makes them experience something they never thought they would have—the steaks,” Rainwater said. “[They say] ‘I've never had anything like this before.’ At first I thought they were being sarcastic, but it's everybody that comes in.”
- 1016 E. 15th St., Plano
- www.barranchco.com
