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Christopher Gardner Big Flavors: Enormous steaks emerge from the tile-lined kitchen at The Grill at the Fairmont A gorgeous new Grill in town opens its doors to power lunchers, celebrity diners and anybody who needs a great steak By Christina Waters POLISHED dark wood and gleaming leather, huge hemispherical chandeliers of burnished glass--the Fairmont Hotel's newest resident is one good-looking destination. The Grill, occupying the former digs of Les Saisons, and sprawling further with a smart, cosmopolitan lounge on the site of a former travel agency, is the Northern California sister of a Beverly Hills dynasty. A big fanfare was made of its opening, and once inside, it's easy to see why. It's a big-shouldered version of the time-honored men's club crossed with gracefully masculine grills along the lines of Tadich and Delmonico's. Green-shaded sconces and coat racks accent each spacious booth, like the one that Katya and I slid into last month. From there we could see both the enormous tile-lined central grill and the exquisite little side bar lined with vintage photos of old San Jose. The place reeks of taste and wealth, and so does its all-American menu. Anything Ernest Hemingway might have eaten is on The Grill's hearty menu--calves liver and onions, steak tartare, oysters on the half shell and an army of prime Angus beef cuts that are among the finest steaks served on the North American continent. On our two recent visits we sampled by-the-glass from the well-crafted wine listing, choosing a sturdy Rodney Strong 1995 Merlot ($8.50), a plummy Firesteed 1996 Pinot Noir ($6.50) and some wonderful 1996 Australian Shiraz from Deakin ($7.50). Each wine kept fine company with astonishingly large and delicious broiled prime New York steaks ($29.75) and another time the world's largest (24 ounces, to be precise) prime porterhouse ($32.50). Please understand that these dishes arrive on gigantic plates, suitable for serving half the NFL at once, with a single vegetable--in one case a branch of broccoli, and in another a mound of excellent shoestring potatoes. With the steaks--the porterhouse was a triumph of beefiness, an archetype of carnivority--came huge, sharply serrated knives. We also loved a moist piece of charbroiled seabass with lemon hollandaise ($23.75) and a side order of garlic mashed potatoes ($4.50) that were more potatoes than my companion had ever seen in one place, and that includes Thanksgiving. The presentation is as aggressively spartan--no nonsense, full of how-the-West-was-won spirit--as the portions are enormous. A main course Niçoise salad with fresh ahi tuna ($19.75) involved the sacrifice of two heads of butter lettuce, along with several tomatoes, a fistful of olives and a half dozen generous slices of rare, seared ahi tuna. All was quite delicious, including the two or three sliced hardboiled eggs that had been buried within the huge leafy pyre. Katya and I and Michael Jordan could have worked on this single dish for an hour and not made a dent in its unrelenting largeness. Was it just because we were women that The Grill's food appears to be so, well, oversized? We watched as fellow diners, a middle-aged couple, received their mountain of broccoli along with steaks that overlapped the edges of their platters. They too were dumbstruck. They avoided these huge meals for a half hour until one of them gamely made the first assault on the north face of a cliff of pork. We admired our appetizer crabcake--one large cake ($9.75), no seasoning, just crab and chives in a bland beurre blanc--and loved our no-frills starter of gravlaaks ($11.50), as well as the high-quality unsalted butter that accompanies the sourdough bread. Service is still uneven, often extremely helpful and swift, other times inappropriately familiar followed by abandonment, but that can be fine-tuned. Desserts proved a mixed bag. The house fresh fruit cobbler ($5.50) arrived with two forks, in a helpful invitation to share the substantial (read: ludicrously large) portion. The vanilla ice cream on top was wonderful, but the cobbler itself was raw, the fruit sour. Another evening, the New York cheesecake ($5.50) lived up to its reputation. High, superbly light and unbelievably creamy, it charmed even my Manhattanite dinner partner. In The Grill, anchoring the graceful Fairmont Hotel, San Jose has a glamorous dining rendezvous that would please both Larry Ellison and Paul Bunyan. It's big, it's beautiful--and so is the food. Very big. The Grill on the Alley Address: 172 S. Market St., San Jose Phone: 408/294-2244 Hours: Mon.-Thu. 11:30am-10pm, Fri.-Sat. 11:30am-11pm; Sunday dinner 4:30-10pm. Extras: Valet parking from 6pm on Cuisine: Big, bold American grill Ambiance: Definitely! [ San Jose | Metroactive Central | Archives ]