Prime Example

John Howie Steaks His Claim

The Bravern is the perfect fit for John Howie Steak. The entrance leads into a waiting area, where the beautiful, chic bar and piano lounge sit to the right. To the left is the hallway lined on either side with half-round booths. It looks like a fashion runway leading into the main dining room. The chef’s latest venture definitely has a softer, more elegant touch than your traditional steak house, and that was one of his major goals in making John Howie Steak a reality.

“When I decided to create this place, I really wanted to do something that wasn’t like an old boys’ club,” Howie said. With all the fashion surrounding The Bravern, creating a “boys’ club would have stuck out like a sore thumb, or a broken heel. But Howie seems to know his audience — his new spot is sophisticated and beautifully appointed, and there’s something for everyone here.

John Howie Steak is Howie’s fourth restaurant after Seastar (Bellevue and Seattle locations) and Sport Restaurant and Bar in Seattle. Opening a new restaurant has been challenging, even for the seasoned veteran.

“You never know what’s not going to be there when it’s supposed to be there,” he said, looking around at his restaurant. Just a few weeks after opening in September, he was still tweaking, adding, and fussing over details in his restaurant, constantly striving for improvement, working hard to make his guests’ experience a positive and memorable one.

“Funniest thing ... our plates, they’re beautiful, from Villeroy and Boch, very nice stuff. But we’ve found that during service, it’s impossible to set the fork on the plates. You set it down, and it will fall off the plate in a guest’s lap. So that’s not something we planned for. We just get new plates and move on.”  

The chef is excited, even with all the little challenges. It’s early on, but the restaurant is already showing trends. It’s busier than he was hoping for in the first week of service, and everything exceeds his expectations.

“Our happy hour is doing amazing so far, and lunch is very strong. We get plenty of lunch shoppers, and the business crowd, the local business support has been so strong. And it’s great to see how things transition toward the evening, when we have live entertainment in our lounge seven nights a week.”

Although his menu includes many cuts of steak, Howie is surprised that many of his customers are more interested in elegant filet mignon rather than a beefy porterhouse or rib cut.

Howie has a say in everything that goes on at his new restaurant. He had a hand in picking out the art, beautiful pieces made by local and national artists. Howie chose materials with his design team, and tried to find materials that told a story and gave his restaurant character. The small, round table tops in the piano lounge are made from reclaimed oak wine barrels. There’s a huge table made from a gigantic slab of reclaimed red elm in the private dining room. The main dining room is brought to life with a stunning wall of thin, wide strips of woven pecan wood.

And of course Howie hand-picked his management team. His general manager, Mark Manca, comes from a family whose roots in the food and beverage industry reach way back into the 1800s with Seattle’s iconic Manca Café. Manca has managed at Harrah’s and the Stratosphere in Las Vegas, as well as Seastar. Mark Hipkiss is the executive chef. He brings his experienced team from the Metropolitan Grill in Seattle. Company wine director Erik Liedholm will manage the wine program along with and Lisa Rongren, formerly of The Herbfarm in Woodinville.

The wine program at John Howie Steak is refined. The restaurant will offer more than 600 wines, about 60 of which will be available by the glass. Private wine lockers are available for guests to bring in their own wines. One of the most exciting things about the wine program is the Enomatic wine dispenser. The dispenser will give you a taste: 2-or 4-ounce glass of super luxe pours. The Enomatic essentially lets you know what a $4,500 bottle of wine tastes like. The bar menu is full of cocktails and spirits, including Spokane distiller DryFly Gin. There is even a house beer on tap, John Howie Steak Amber Ale.

The atmosphere, knowledgeable staff and tasty drinks are amazing, but the food is the real star here. The centerpiece of the dinner menu is a four-tiered steak program, serving 28-and 42-day custom-aged USDA prime steak from Omaha, Nebraska; American Wagyu “Kobe style” beef from Snake River Farms; and true Japanese “A5” 100-percent Waygu beef from Kagashima Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan. Among the dinner cuts are an eye-popping 40-ounce porterhouse and a scintillating bone-in rib cut, served with side orders like Beechers Flagship mac ’n cheese or kurobuta creamed spinach with a sunny-side egg.

The menu doesn’t stop at steak. Salads, seafood and chops manage to stand out amongst the beef choices. Howie uses a combination grill in his kitchen — mesquite coals and applewood — to pull different flavors out of different proteins.

The restaurant also makes almost everything in house. “We are a chef-driven restaurant. We bake our own bread, make our own sauces, everything is done from stock. We have partnerships with local farms and we feature at least three kinds of fresh fish on our menu,” Howie said.

As he looks over to the piano lounge and to the beautiful façade of The Bravern, with its outdoor fireplaces ablaze, he says: “To have all this at your fingertips … we really believe that this is a destination in the making.”

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