The steak portion of the menu is divided into à la carte cuts, composed entrées, and variations of steak frites. It’s also tough to pinpoint what will be coming out of the kitchen-because it isn’t consistent, particularly when it comes to beef, the supposed star of the show. One night the customers seemed like suburbanites, prosperous and unflashy another night, the noisy, beer-swilling businessmen you’d see at Grill 23 another night, the fastidiously dressed, mostly gay South Enders who have been the neighborhood’s bread and butter.

After my three meals at Boston Chops, however, it was tough to pinpoint exactly who the restaurant will appeal to. Perhaps they were looking to attract the kinds of sleek crowds that have made the nearby restaurants Gaslight and Cinquecento such loud successes. The location, however, is an odd choice for a big steakhouse-an upscale, self-consciously hip neighborhood doesn’t seem like the first place you’d go to close the deal over a fat-marbled rib-eye and an icy martini.Ĭo-owners Brian Piccini and Chris Coombs (who also runs the kitchen )-the team behind the successful Dbar, in Dorchester, and Deuxave, in the Back Bay-say that they saw a business opportunity for a steakhouse in an area that lacked one. It’s also deliberately masculine-think dark tufted-leather banquettes and dark wooden tables without tablecloths. Whereas the Met Club and Morton’s aim for bland businessman’s lounge, and Smith & Wollensky and Grill 23 for Gilded Age extravagance, Boston Chops is more urban, with its exposed brick and wrought-iron bars on the newly uncovered high windows. The ambiance at Boston Chops, on the other hand, says meat. But maybe Boston Chops’ dark, medieval-banquet-hall-in-Vegas décor will succeed where Banq and Ginger Park failed-failed, I’d argue, because their well-priced, often wonderful Singaporean and Thai street food was too unusual for such a big space, and that spellbinding design didn’t give the slightest hint of what kind of cuisine you might be in for. I couldn’t help but mourn the loss of the most distinctive interior of any Boston restaurant in two or three decades: No one who dined among the Nordic stalactites will forget it. I walked into Boston Chops, the self-titled “urban steak bistro” in the former Banq/Ginger Park space, with an admitted chip on my shoulder-a birch-plywood chip. Some of the best dishes at Boston Chops-like the wild-mushroom cavatelli ($26)-are actually meat-free.

Boston chops