5651 Transit Road, E. Amherst NY 14051
Web: Jim's Steak-Out
Phone: 716.688.8300
Rating:
[learn more]Pros:
Open for lunch and late night dinners, this multi-location local chain offers a sandwich-heavy menu with a number of fried entrees and sides.
Cons:
Items are overly greasy, and not always as hot as they should be; while meat quantities tend to be appropriate for the prices, the overall quality of items is only passable.
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"Over our two recent visits, only one of the items we've ordered was really good, and only one was bad, with everything else falling into the fine but overly greasy category."
Oil isn't evil - in fact, disasterous results often await those who try to eliminate it from every possible food: Buffalonians know well that chicken wings and fish fry wouldn't taste the same without deep frying. By the same token, there's an appropriate level of oil for every food, and for decades, there's been a shift away from preparations that leave breaded meats and vegetables dripping with the stuff. Jim's SteakOut appears to be bucking that trend: for years, this well-known local restaurant chain has thrived on late-night business, serving sandwiches and fried items to hungry party animals, so after our second visit in a couple of months, we decided to give it a mini-review for Buffalo Chow.
Jim's SteakOut has been in operation since 1981, and today, there are nine similar locations everywhere from Buffalo to Amherst, Clarence, Tonawanda, and West Seneca, all open until 5:00am at least a few days a week, if not every day. The menu is extremely simple: it's submarine sandwiches and chopped steak-filled variants called hoagies, plus burgers, chicken fingers, boneless chicken wings, and tacos, with two wraps, a handful of salads, and a few fried sides.
On our most recent visit, we sampled a number of menu items, starting with one of "Jim's Famous Steak Hoagies," sold for $7 (8") or $9 (12"). A loaf of bread was sliced in half, filled with "steak chopped on the grill," and complemented by fried onions, lettuce, tomato, and "Jim's Secret Sauce;" we ordered it without the standard melted cheese. The Hoagie arrived with plenty of greasy meat - the Secret Sauce is, as it turns out, oil-based - and though it was appropriately offset with lettuce, it was light on tomatoes, and the onions were there, but hard to taste over the sauce and meat. In splitting the sandwich, both of us felt that it was fine - not particularly memorable in any way save for its oiliness and quality of the "steak" meat, which had been shredded to a point where it was just hovering above ground beef in quality. Like a steak and cheese sub ($5/6", $8/12") we'd ordered from the short list of hot and cold sub picks on a prior occasion, the Hoagie wasn't something we'd rush back for, but it wasn't bad; just too oily.
To SteakOut's partial credit, we expected oil in our other entree items - Chicken Fingers and Boneless Wings - but even as big wing fans, we didn't anticipate just how excessively greasy they'd be. We ordered five of the breaded Fingers for $9.39, served with french fries, bleu cheese and carrot sticks; ordered with medium wing sauce, the chicken looked thoroughly unlike the version shown on the menu, soaking in a yellow oil that was all over the container and the included fries. Like the Hoagie, the Fingers and fries weren't bad, but weren't very good, either; had they been especially crispy or tasty, the grease might have made sense, but they were just oily without any benefit. We actually enjoyed eating the small bag of carrots more than the rest of the entree.
The best of the items was the order of 10 Boneless Wings (5/$5.29, 10/$8, 20/$12.29), which were crispy enough and in a shallow pool of spicy hot sauce. All but one of our items had been served warm - a little below our preferred heat - but the Wings were actually physically hot, which we liked. Jim's Onion Rings ($2.49) came out at around room temperature, and were too few in number. This was the worst of the things we received, but it was obvious that they would have tasted fine had they been served more quickly after they were prepared.
Overall, our impressions of Jim's SteakOut are neither extremely positive nor extremely negative; they're basically right in the middle, at a two-star level. Over our two recent visits, only one of the items we've ordered was really good, and only one was bad, with everything else falling into the fine but overly greasy category - the sort of meal that will fill you up but may leave you feeling a bit queasy, as it did us. We wouldn't rush back unless it was the middle of the night and everything else was closed, but given SteakOut's usually long hours of operation, that seems to be exactly the point.
