Craftsteak At MGM Grand At Foxwoods

Located in Ledyard.

Craftsteak is celebrity chef Tom Colicchio's gift to Connecticut.

It's the incredible taste, not the exorbidant prices, which make it such a gift.

Mr Colicchio is co-host of Bravo's Top Chef.

He also owns other properties in New York.

On our lone visit so far, my wife and I took along her mother.

The dining room is, of course, large(it's in a casino, afterall), and nicely appointed.

The menu features, as you might expect, steak.

But these aren't your garden variety steaks.

These are the grass fed, corn fed, wagyu variety.

Now, if you're like me, you think there's nothing terribly special about steak.Oh sure, it tastes great. But you can accomplish that at home, simply by buying a prime rib-eye and throwing it on the grill. I never order steaks at restaurants; and consider Outback a really great scam.

That's what I had always thought, and practiced.

I was wrong. And so are you.

In other words, if you think you know steak...you don't.

I started with fresh bacon(Colicchio's terminology for pork belly), my wife with hamachi, my mother-in-law with a Caesar salad.

The salad was fine, as expected.

I don't care much, at all, for raw fish, so I'm no judge of the hamachi, but my wife enjoyed it.

My pork belly was good, but I have to admit, I've had better...at the Hole In The Wall Pub in Little Wilbraham, England.

Onto the mains.

I had a grade 11 wagyu New York strip steak, my wife the skirt steak, and mother-in-law the corn fed filet Mignon(she committed the sin of ordering it well. She knows better, being a test cook for Delia Smith, but cannot bring herself to eat steak with even a hint of pink.)

Sides are served family style, meaning one order will feed 2-3 people.
I wasn't buying this, so we ordered 3 sides: fingerling potatoes with bacon, Tokyo turnips, and cippolini onions.

The food arrived.
Oh, my!
Not only did I finish my 7 ounces of New York strip(at $30 per oz. I couldn't justify 8 ounces), but helped my wife finish her skirt steak.(And I'm not a big guy.) Impossible to describe the flavor, suffice it to say, you will never eat a better steak...ever!
My wife's steak was cooked well, after being ordered medium. Our server offered to return it to the kitchen, but suggested we taste it before doing so. It could not have been better. Or maybe it could have, but we didn't care!
The steaks were served with 3 sauces, the only one of which I remember was chimichuri.
Simply delicious.
I didn't care for the filet mingnon, but it was cooked well, so it's really not fair to judge it...and it wasn't wagyu beef...so, doubly unfair, perhaps.

The fingerling potatoes and bacon were excellent, as they should have been. Fingerlings have a dense, buttery texture, and bacon, well, it's bacon!
The cippolinis, roasted, were also excellent. Nicely caramelized. Very tasty.
The Tokyo turnips were so salty as to be inedible. But we didn't complain.

If you like steak, go!
If you love steak, go!
If you think you know steak...go!