Porca Vacca - Brace e Dintorni

I have held off writing this review for a couple of weeks since returning from our trip to Italy to let my thoughts congeal, so to speak. Here it goes.

We found Porca Vacca by searching for restaurants in Salerno and decided to have lunch there one day. We were greeted and escorted to our table, water was poured, and bread served while we perused the menu. Now let me state that this is chop house and they have the beef - several different varieties from several countries and regions - visible in refrigerated cases. The steaks were priced by the hectogram - which is about 3.5 ounces. My wife and I had each decided on a cut of beef apiece and planned to order steaks of 3 to 4 hectograms each.

A short time later a man approached our table and his mode of dress was so different that the waiters with their white shirts, white aprons, and black pants that I initially wasn't sure he even worked there. His outfit was much more casual, and the best I could describe it is akin to a medium velour track suite or similar. He began speaking in Italian, which was no surprise and no offense, and when we spoke to him in English he switched and did a passable job. That's not a complaint, as we were the visitors and actually should have learned more Italian before we travelled there.

I began to tell him which steak I wanted and that I wanted somewhere between 3 and 4 hectograms. As soon I said that he blurted out "kilo minimum". My reaction and response was that I didn't want an approximately 2.2 lb steak for lunch. Even if my wife and I were to share a steak that's much more meat that we wanted for lunch. His response to that information was to become pretty dismissive and flipped my wife's menu to a page of 'Don's Choices', or something like that. Basically, steak options that were sold by the item and not by weight. My wife asked which he recommended and he pointed to one, said its name (which escapes me), and immediately took her menu. I was a bit taken aback by the gruffness he exhibited and chose to say that I would take the same rather than show my frustration.

It seemed to me that this gentleman judged us as Americans, and by the fact that we did not want a kilogram size steak. I believe he might have thought us cheap, probably assuming that we didn't want to pay the price of the nicer steak (a kilo of Chianina beef worked out to be about $60 Euros), but I assure you that wasn't our motivation to turn down a kilo steak. It was just that it was too much food for us for lunch. Worse still, the steaks that we received were cut into strips, mixed with greens, and was some of the toughest and chewiest meat I have had in some time - especially at chop/steak house.

Our experience may have been unique, or maybe the individual was having a bad day, but honestly, we wouldn't dine there again and would recommend against it. Unfortunate - we were looking forward to a great steak.