Comments

  • I felt the same nervous apprehension from the staff as you did. But I thought the food was pretty good, albeit certainly not great. I think you’re being too hard on these guys. The food I felt was above average and I believe worth what they were charging. I’m not going to rave about these guys, but at the same time I wouldn’t put them down either. Yes there is room for improvement, but at the same time they’re offer something you can’t find anywhere else in Forest Hills. You’d have to travel to Astoria to find something similar. I think steakhouse is a misnomer for this place, I believe its really offering a modern American fair. The offer a surprisingly wide array of menu choices for a steak house. I think the place is definitely worth a shot, weird staff vibes aside.

    Posted by Bifstec Charlie
    on September 18th, 2009 at 12:08 am

  • I can see your point, Bifstec, but a restaurant that is called “aged” that features a Peter-Luger-style menu (steak for 1, steak for 2, side of spinach, etc.) is portraying itself to be a steakhouse. Also, I don’t like giving FoHi restaurants a free pass if there’s an implication that they’re comparing themselves to Manhattan - as if that’s some magical, mythical standard - yet fall short on the actual level of quality. I don’t want to pay Manhattan prices for mediocrity, and that tends to happen a lot around here. BTW, another excellent steakhouse in Queens is Uncle Jack’s in Bayside, which def can compete with the best of them.

    Posted by Mickie T
    on October 4th, 2009 at 8:14 pm

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Passed its prime

Posted by Mickie T on Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Here’s another catch-up restaurant review: We went to aged in late June this year, and we were not impressed.  The bottom line is, if you’re going to spend $70 on a porterhouse steak,  don’t bother going here.  If you want to have good steak in Forest Hills, go to Buenos Aires Tango near the firehouse (which we reviewed last year), or, even easier, simply walk next door to Cabana and get the bistec with chimichurri sauce.

Ginormous wine glass

As you know from reading this blog,  we are steak people. Vegetarians we are not. As mentioned, we’ve reviewed Buenos Aires Tango and P.J.’s Steakhouse (before it morphed into a “grill”) on this blog. We cook a lot of different types of steak at home, but during the boom years of the early 2000’s, my spouse and her colleagues set up a “round robin” of sorts, taking each other out to various steakhouses around NYC.

I was lucky enough to tag along,  and we got to sink our teeth into some of NYC ’s best (and not so best) steaks: Peter Luger’s, Uncle Jack’s, Wolfgang’s, Ben and Jack’s, craftsteak, Landmarc - Time Warner, and our current favorite, BLT STeak.

We know the drill, we know our steak.  We believe there should be a “wasted meat” fine imposed on people who order steak “well.”

Our meat

We were  cautiously optimitstic about aged. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good value for steak. The service was bland, the bread was bland, and probably the biggest culinary crime at aged was that the steak was bland. I needed to salt my steak. How is that allowed?

We also thought it was weird that they served their wines in GINORMOUS glasses and that they used floor tiles as wall tiles. And, they have NO WEBSITE. How can you operate a restaurant in NYC in the 21st Century, on the “restaurant rows” of an upscale, “famous” neighborhood and not have a website?

The bar

Given the mediocre food, and touch of nervous insecurity you feel from the staff, it just seemed like the place is guilty of committing a common mis-step of FoHi restaurants: trying too hard with nothing to back it up. If you come here for the outdoor seating, wannabe-glamorous atmosphere, or happy hour wine deals, I hope you enjoy. If you come here for steak, stick a fork in it, it’s done.