Upscale steakhouses continue to pop up around New Orleans, with three opening for business in just the last year alone. All of these newcomers share one thing in common: hefty, hefty prices. In most of these places an unaccompanied steak, as prime as prime can be, will run you between $20 and $30 with nothing more than a sprig of parsley beside it on the plate.

Meanwhile, New Orleans and its environs have been home to another breed of steakhouse where the food can be just as satisfying, if less elegantly presented. These are the blue-collar steakhouses, restaurants for people who want to enjoy a serious steak without any fussy surroundings or prices that could have been dreamed up by a defense contractor.

The two best examples of these casual, devoutly local places are Charlie’s Steak House in Uptown and Crazy Johnnie’s Steak House in the Fat City area of Metairie. The steaks are big and well prepared, the sides and starters are appropriately simple and, after paying through the nose at more upscale places, the prices seem like a throwback to our parents’ generation.

In fact, at Charlie’s just about everything seems like a throwback, from the service to the surroundings. It’s hard to believe a place like this still exists but there it is tucked in behind Pascal’s Manale and the Sacred Heart Academy in an otherwise residential neighborhood.

Charlie’s serves only two cuts of steak, a T-bone and a filet. Sometimes they offer a “small” and “large” version of each, but not always. It doesn’t matter; even what they call their small is prehistorically big and at $12.50 is much lighter on the wallet than on the belly.

Charlie’s is so locals-oriented that even if you’ve never been there before they will assume you have the menu memorized. In fact, there is no menu. Each time I visited, the waiter simply asked us what we wanted. When we asked what they had, he looked surprised and then rattled off a quick list of the two steaks, a salad, four side dishes and one dessert.

The steaks at Charlie’s are served doused in sizzling butter, the same style that Ruth’s Chris Steak House has made nationally famous at more than twice the price. The steaks are cooked in a blazingly hot broiler that gives them a gratifyingly firm exterior no matter how rare the meat may be within.

When the steaks come out, the whole restaurant knows about it. The waiter comes barreling down the small, narrow dining room carrying two metal plates at a time with white kitchen towels. Smoke wafts up from the plates, making him look like a locomotive running at speed, and the sizzle drowns out all conversation. Then, as the steaks appear before you, it’s time to take a defensive posture. The butter, still boiling, shoots up so furiously that diners are advised to hold their brown cloth napkins up like a stage curtain lest they get stained or singed. The plates are so hot that when I poured some steak sauce on one the stuff started boiling immediately. The whole production is like the surprise arrival of a birthday cake with the sparkler candles all blazing.

The side dishes, all $4 each, follow the decadent theme of the butter-coated steaks. The French fries are huge, roughly hewn logs of potato that come out crispy on the outside and soft inside. What they call potatoes au gratin resembles a cheese pie and your first forkful reveals lightly mashed potatoes covered with a thick quilt of cheddar. By the time I polished off a filet and half an order of these potatoes, my mouth was so slick with butter that my tongue could barely form words properly.

Some people might be put off by the atmosphere of Charlie’s single dining room, which is well-weathered and rather Spartan. If people weren’t eating in it, the space could be mistaken for a storeroom. There is a bar just inside the front boor, but it is so thoroughly deserted it seems a little eerie. Jack Torrance could be hiding somewhere behind the bottles.

But what the place lacks in atmosphere, it more than makes up for in character. The windowless dining room, the open kitchen, the building’s nondescript façade and somewhat battered, blue-painted front door all recall a clubby lair of beef and beer from decades past. There should always be big Cadillac parked at the curb and burly men with loosened ties chowing down inside.

On one visit the hostess obligingly called out baseball scores across the room to diners who couldn’t see the small television in the corner. When you order a beer, the waiter gets it from an unceremonious kitchen refrigerator, the kind you see in apartments. Their one dessert, spumoni, comes from the freezer on top. Wine comes from boxes stacked in a cupboard. All are in plain view in the dining room, near a table where the waiter counts money and eats his own dinner. This place has nothing to hide.

Crazy Johnnie’s, in Fat City, shares a similarly casual atmosphere, inexpensive steaks and locals-only clientele. The menu has more innovation and many more choices, however, while also presenting the classic steak cuts with deft preparation. Here you can get a sirloin or prime rib, but also grilled steak tips covered in a garlic cream sauce, which they call Filet Mischa. At lunch, they serve a po-boy stuffed to bursting with chunks of tender filet mignon and slathered in garlic butter.

That sandwich measures a foot long on soft French bread. Like most of the steak dishes here, it comes with a helping of buttery potato salad and at $4.25 is one of the best deals anywhere.

All the prices are surprisingly cheap. A 12-ounce sirloin, with potatoes, is $7.95 and the prime rib au jus is $9.95. The filet is wonderful, an eight-and-a-half ounce round of beef. They cook it perfectly, even when we asked for it medium rare. This can be a tricky preparation, but they got it just right, delivering a steak with a firm crust surrounding a deep red center that flowed like liquid across the tongue. All this for $11.95.

I tried to pry the secret for the low prices from various staff members there but the only answer I got was the mantra “volume, volume, volume.” Which is probably true; the place is busy every time I go, even at off hours.

Looking around Crazy Johnnie’s, its easy to see more it evolved from just a bar to a bar that sometimes served steaks at cost on special occasions to a steakhouse that had to knock out walls to accommodate the response to its delicious, exceedingly cheap menu. It’s a cave-dark space, where sunlight seems like an intrusion on the video poker and the menthol-gilded Metairie ladies knocking back bourbon cocktails in the afternoon.

You can get more than red meat at Crazy Johnnie’s, including a tuna steak, grilled chicken, New Orleans barbecue shrimp and etouffees, all priced in line with the steaks.

The parking is appallingly bad, as is the case throughout Fat City. There’s a designated parking lot, but the pavement is so tectonically broken that only SUVs can manage it. There is a parking lot a block away that none of the other businesses have explicitly staked a claim to and you can park here without fear of being towed or losing your car in a pothole.

REVIEWED THIS MONTH:
Charlie’s Steak House:  450 Dryades St., 895-9323.
Crazy Johnnie’s Steak House: 3520 18th St., Metairie, 887-6641.