Outback Steakhouse

666 Everywhere St
Everywhere, USA, 66666
1-800-OUTBACK-SUXS

Let me start off by announcing to all the “food blogging ethics” Nazis that my brother owns this particular Outback Steakhouse, which is located somewhere in Louisiana but of course I won’t say exactly where. Rest assured I won’t go easy on him; I’m going to issue many literary noogies to Outback’s food just like I’ve given ACTUAL noogies to the brother who owns this fucking place. After all, I hold my friends and family to a higher standard than my enemies. My enemies can go fuck your mom for all I care. Oh wait: they already did!

Everyone knows about Outback Steakhouse, and don’t pretend that you don’t, you pretentious motherfucks. There’s a bunch of varnished blonde wood inside and lots of fake “Australian” crap, like boomerangs and “Kangaroo Crossing” signs, on the walls everywhere. They give you gigantic Crocodile Dundee- style steak knives and the waiters wear shirts with epaulets, as if that’s more “Australian” somehow than a regular shirt. Maybe they need the epaulets to hold the rope they use to lasso the kangaroos for the freshly butchered kangaroo meat that Outback sells. Or maybe those epaulets are the only thing holding the waiters’ dignity in place when they have to collect the $2.19 tip from a party of 12 that Outback’s hillbilly clientele typically leave them.

The worst thing about Outback (surprisingly it’s NOT the food) is the customers. All of the dudes seem to have goatees which follow a peculiar natural law: the bigger the overhang on the dude’s beer gut, the bushier his goatee, so that the very fattest of Outback’s gentleman patrons appear to have gigantic pubic thickets from a 1970’s Playboy issue sprouting from their chins. All of the women dining at Outback look like they will eventually appear in amateur bukakke videos. And according to my brother, they’re scam artists, one and all. He can’t count the number of times customers have “found” glass in their food. You’d think that shattered glass is a garnish at Outback. And a couple douchebags once found a ladybug in their salad and claimed they were so embarrassed by the experience that only $500 in Outback gift cards could salve their wounded egos. Honestly I don’t know what’s worse: Outback’s hokey Australian minstrel show or the classless fucks who patronize the place. Or maybe they deserve one another: garbage in, garbage out.

But I digress. As much as I would love to further expound upon the plebians who jam- pack their lard asses into Outback’s varnished wooden booths, this is, after all, a food blog and not a symposium on regional varieties of rednecks. So I should get around, I suppose, to the food. It isn’t as bad as you might think: the sweet glazed roasted pork loin ($10.95) was a half a tenderloin, sliced into medallions and presented with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables. ”Prepare to be impressed!” proclaims the menu. They obviously mistook me for one of the ubiquitous infomercial ladies who can’t believe how EASY or CONVENIENT or SPACE SAVING the product in the infomercial is because I’m not that easily impressed. I will admit that I was surprised by how perfectly cooked the loin was: succulent and juicy, cooked to a rosy medium, with a flavorful seasoned exterior crust. Alas, Outback couldn’t leave well enough alone, because the pork loin was dribbled in an obnoxious pink sauce that seemed like it came from one of those packets of sweet- and- sour sauce you get when you buy shitty egg rolls from Panda Express. Embedded in the sticky sauce were tiny crispy shards of something I couldn’t identify but which, according to my brother, were corn flakes sautéed in butter. What. The. Fuck. The garlic mashed potatoes were very garlicky but had the consistency of stucco. The vegetables, a boilerplate mix of broccoli and carrots, were crisp and tasty and fresh- tasting and perhaps best of all, they didn’t feel the need to drench these in 20 gallons of melted butter or whatever the fuck.

The crab stuffed shrimp ($4.95) was okay. For that price you got four large shrimp tails, butterflied and piled with a gloopy mixture of crab meat, some variety of melted cheese, and breadcrumbs. The shrimp weren’t overcooked at least and still had a pleasant little snap to them. This dish would have been better if the shrimp weren’t floating in a ½” deep moat of melted butter: salty, salty, salted butter. This butter sauce is okay if you dip a piece of Outback’s vaunted bread (vaunted by hillbillies anyway), which comes in smooth, chocolatey brown oblong loaves and is delivered to your table by the waitress with one of their Crocodile Dundee steak knives protruding murderously from it.

I was disappointed by the fresh tilapia with pure lump crabmeat ($14.95), but only because the oddly straightforward name of this dish has none of the descriptive flair of the rest of Outback’s menu. I think it would have tasted better if they called this dish “Mel Gibson’s Holocaust- Denyingly Delicious Fish.” That’s because you’d need an asshole- puckering name like that to make Tilapia interesting. Yes, the fish was tender and flaky, and you got a gargantuan portion of it, topped with a gigantic avalanche of shredded blue crabmeat in an otherwise inoffensive white wine and butter sauce, but Tilapia is so fucking lame. Still, it was otherwise tasty. This was probably the best thing I ate at Outback. It came with a side of steamed green beans which were still a little crisp inside and shockingly green.

A cup of potato soup was served in what I would call more of a “cauldron” than a cup, and at $2.95 cost next to nothing. Chunks of tender potato floated in a creamy broth, laced through with strings of melted cheddar, chunks of bacon, and diced scallion. This was pretty good, but it was more like a baked potato that had been eaten by a pelican then regurgitated to feed its young than a soup.

The Victoria’s filet with lobster ($26.95) was served in the classic surf- n- turf configuration. The only weird thing about this dish was the fact that my spell checking software, in a weird postmodern quirk, is not offended by “surf- n- turf.” This culinary menagerie featured a really large filet mignon and three lobster tail halves. Honestly, if you’re into filet mignon, the Bryant Gumbel of beef, you can’t go wrong, not even at Outback. The filet was gigantic and tender and had a nicely seasoned caramelized crust. The lobster tails, on the other hand, weren’t quite as tasty: too salty and a bit leathery and accompanied by a ramekin of Outback’s extra salty salted butter for dipping. You can choose your potato configuration: baked potato, fries, or garlic mashed. I chose a baked potato which was basically the potato soup, before it was partially digested by the aforementioned pelican. The flesh of the potato was fluffy, the skin was salted, and it came with a twin scoop of whipped butter (which stared up at you from the perforated potato skin like a pair of buttery breasts), green onions, bacon bits, and cheddar cheese and was otherwise a fully realized example of a potato which has been baked then slathered with shitloads of stuff.

Outback Steakhouse is definitely okay. It’s the kind of place that’s usually pretty reliable if you’re stuck in some shithole in the hinterlands on business, or if your car broke down, or if you’re hoarding guns nearby and you need a break from hoarding guns because you’re getting hungry then by all means go to Outback. But only if your brother owns it and you don't have to pay a goddamned dime. And for the love of christ tip your waiter you redneck shitheads.

Rating: 5 angry phone calls from my mom out of 10



PS Outback puts so much butter in and on every dish, that if you could somehow scavenge all of the butter out of a typical three course meal, you’d have enough to sculpt a life- size sex doll entirely out of butter. And that would be pretty awesome.