The first memory of eating at a shopping mall we can muster is a late morning in the early eighties, sucking down a corn dog with the family at Hot Dog on a Stick at Santa Monica Place.
I also recall the day in 1987 our father took us to Century Square Shopping Center to see its new “food court,” a rather revolutionary concept on paper, despite a scarcity of anything you’d really wanted to eat.
Things are different today. Now Century Square is known as Westfield Century City and the mall is no far from a lackluster place to eat.
The argument could even be made that Westfield, an Australian company with malls across the world, has itself been instrumental in raising the bar on shopping center dining.
The Westfield in Santa Anita has more than a few standout options for Asian cooking, including Taiwan’s legendary soup dumpling spot, Din Tai Fung, and acclaimed Sichuan restaurant Meizhou Dongpo, both of which you’ll also find in Westfield’s Century City shopping center.
But what we really needed while bleeding out our bank accounts on Frozen dolls this year was a steakhouse. A traditional steakhouse with a sexy look, stiff drinks and attentive service in the middle of consumerist hell. And that exact gift recently arrived in the form of Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse, located on the second floor of Westfield Century City.
Striding through the giant glass doors is an instantly transporting experience. Glass walls filled with wine bottles greet you, with some particularly eye-catching prizes found front-and-center like Château Haut-Brion, Romanée-Conti and Château Lafite Rothschild.
This welcome serves to let you know that if it’s a big night with clients or loved ones and you need to go there, you can certainly go there here.
Beyond that is a sexy, circular bar where a few pretty people flirted over martinis. We were led up a winding set of carpeted stairs to a charming corner table on the restaurant’s 2nd floor, overlooking the snarl of Santa Monica Boulevard.
There’s something about a great steakhouse you can sense the moment you’re seated, as you cede all control and stress to the ether. You just know you’re in good hands, like those of the friendly server and helpful sommelier who appeared in quick succession to introduce themselves.
Double Eagle Steakhouse has locations across the States. One thing that drew us into the menu was a selection that honors traditional steakhouse fare but also goes beyond the common to offer some rarities and innovations.
Here you’ll find creative choices such as thick-cut bacon au poivre, duck confit meatballs l’orange, broiled lobster carved tableside and dry-aged lamb, in addition to the dishes you’d probably expect. There’s also caviar service, naturally.
But we had heard good things about Double Eagle’s crab cakes. So we ordered them as starters. And we were not disappointed by the large, seasoned shards of fresh lump crab mixed with herbs, onion and peppers served with a lobster cream sauce, but sans the typical battering. It will be hard to return and not revisit this appetizer, as much as the shellfish plateau is calling us back.
Our other appetizer came in the form of two long octopus tentacles, creamy and tender with a slight char to the skin and a sufficiently acidic accompaniment of lemon herb vinaigrette with earth-spiced radishes and pea tendrils.
Then came the meat. A truly seductive option is Double Eagle’s Wagyu menu, which offers Japanese A5 Wagyu, Australian Wagyu and American Wagyu by the 3oz. serving as well as a sampler of all three.
As tempting as that was, we ordered the 45-day-aged USDA Prime ribeye steak and, with our curiosity piqued earlier, the 14-day dry-aged Colorado Prime lamb. We see a lot of beef being aged in our area. Hollywood’s APL Steakhouse even pushes the possibilities with sporadic steaks aged beyond a year. But we can’t remember seeing dry-aged lamb.
The ribeye, a sturdy mass of meat, came with an alluring crust. Before handing it over, our server asked us to make a small incision into the side to allow us to see the gorgeous pink we had desired when requesting our steak medium-rare. The steak was everything we had hoped for, the dry-aged funk deep and the meat clean, juicy and tender.
The lamb arrived in a beguiling arrangement, pre-carved from the bone in a chevron of slices, each one bright pink and crowned with a thin cap of fat. Each taste was delicately floral, the dry-aging adding a unique layer of umami to the lamb’s tamed gaminess.
There was not a misstep in either pristine serving of meat, something we wish we could say about every pricey steakhouse on L.A.’s Westside but, tragically, can not.
Sides are only of slightly less importance than meat to a solid steakhouse. Here, the creamed corn comes with shishito peppers, the onion rings thick-cut, and the mac-and-cheese and mashed potatoes both lobster studded.
We wanted them all, but knew we’d be hurting by going that route, so we opted for creamed spinach and wild mushrooms instead. The wild mushrooms, a lightly sautéed miscellany of caps and stems, were served al dente, exposing their true nature in each bite of woodsy majesty. The creamed spinach may be a heavyweight contender for the town’s best, with decadent additions of smoked bacon, smoked cheddar, egg and mushroom.
We’d had a rather perfect steakhouse experience by that point. A duo of strong, Añejo Old Fashioneds began our evenings while a sommelier-recommended old world Syrah paired beautifully with both of our main courses.
For dessert, we considered the upside pineapple cake and salted caramel fudge chocolate mousse. But with our souls and bellies full, we decided on a plate of berries and cream. A simple end to a pitch-perfect night.
We don’t choose to spend a lot of our free time in malls. But there’s something encouraging in the discovery that shopping center dining options are suddenly stellar enough to stand on their own.
With entrancing spaces offering stand-out service, innovative product and idealized experiences, like Double Eagle does for the U.S. steakhouse, it feels like the day has arrived when in-mall dining is soon to be as compulsory as a trip to a megaplex or Macy’s.
Double Eagle Steakhouse, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd Suite 1700, Los Angeles, CA 90067, (323) 784-0473
All photos: Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steakhouse
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