A Steakhouse That Skips The Starch
Garlic butter steakThe garlic butter steak is the reason for the reservation, a straightforward cut built for the wood grill and finished simply so the fat does the talking.
Salmon collarSalmon collar rewards the diner willing to work around bones for the richest, most fat-marbled part of the fish.
Deviled eggsDeviled eggs open the meal at a steakhouse pace, a cold snack meant to hold the table before the grill dishes land.
St. Anselm sells itself as a steakhouse and then spends half the menu proving there is more to the room than the chop. The garlic butter steak is the anchor, priced and cooked for a table that wants a shared centerpiece rather than individual filets under a dome. But the salmon collar is the dish that tells the real story: an unglamorous cut, fatty and forgiving on the grill, served with the kind of confidence that says the kitchen is not just working a broiler, it is working fire.
Deviled eggs on a steakhouse menu might read as filler elsewhere; here they function as a signal, a room willing to open on something cheap and unfussy before it charges upscale prices for the main event. That split personality suits its place on the Washington dining map. This is not a downtown power room built for expense-account lunches; the menu and the pricing point toward dinner with a group or a date, the kind of night where a table orders the steak to split, a few smaller plates to argue over, and does not need white tablecloth formality to feel like an occasion. The wood-fired approach that shows up across the grilled dishes, the collar included, reads as the kitchen's actual point of view rather than a garnish on a standard steakhouse formula.
Price sits at the upscale tier, which tracks with a cut like the garlic butter steak but asks the smaller plates to do some value work, and by most accounts they do. The room reads as group-friendly and casual enough for a Friday with friends, formal enough to still function as a date-night booking. It is a steakhouse that has clearly decided the chop is not the only thing worth doing well, and that the collar, the eggs, and the fire are just as much the point as the center-cut.
