Making meat-and-potatoes memories at Clearman’s Steak ‘N Stein Inn

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

John Clearman opened Clear-man’s Steak ‘N Stein Inn in Pico Rivera in 1946, the same year that Winston Churchill first warned of the Iron Curtain and Dr. Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care. The Nuremburg trial was wrapping up, television peaked at 12 hours per week on two networks, and “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” was a hit. My father was 10 years old. (I would come along some 35 years later.)

In the mid-1950s my dad began taking my mom on dates to the restaurant—Beef en Brochette was $3.95—and they have returned each year since on anniversaries, birthdays and special occasions (most recently, on my father’s 72nd birthday; the Beef en Brochette was $23.95). The look of the restaurant has changed, they tell me—new stained glass panels serve as dividers where none used to be; pastoral paintings hang where portraits of naked women once loomed, though I noticed this, too—but the food, oh, the food, has not. For going on 62 years straight, Steak ‘N Stein has served some of the biggest, bloodiest, delicious-est steaks to be found in Southern California, along with addictive (even to the most healthy of eaters) cheese bread, giant bottomless salads and baked potatoes bigger than a baby’s head. No kid.

It’s likely that you have visited at least one of the other Clearman’s restaurants at some point—the long-shuttered North Woods Inn on Second Street, maybe, or the North Woods Inns in La Mirada, one of just three remaining—and so you can picture what I mean when I say Steak ‘N Stein is just like those, only a notch nicer. Like the North Woods Inn, here you enter first into a bar. Only this time, it’s a spacious, red, dim-lit circular lounge with a fireplace in its center. (And no peanut shells on the floor.) Instead of wooden chairs and tables, you park it on what would under normal circumstances look like Grandma’s outdoor patio furniture, but here just seems cozy and cool and right. You sip cocktails, but in lieu of watching TV, you talk. For you historical preservationist cats, the lounge alone could be worthy of a trip.

But you don’t drive all the way down the 605 just for a Manhattan, no matter how spectacular the surroundings. No, you come for the meat. And the potatoes. You come for the only appetizer on the menu, an entree-sized shrimp cocktail ($14.95), and for that delicious Beef en Brochette (the menu describes it best: “Litte Steaks on a Skewer”). You come for the salad served with three dressings (red French, chunky bleu cheese, and a house sour cream and chive) and homemade croutons; for the bread; and for the steaming hot baked potatoes (ask the waiter for “the works,” a seasoned potato mashed tableside with multiple tabs of butter, warmed cheese sauce, sour cream and the best onion/chive mix you’ll ever have, ever).

And you leave with traditions: You must pour a little of each dressing on the salad (as my sister and her family does) or you can’t leave without wrapping a few pieces of bread in your napkin and asking for more to go (guilty here) or you skip the meat all together and stick with the shrimp cocktail and a salad (as The District’s Steve Lowery would have ordered, if I hadn’t stolen this review from him). And, later that night, when all that meat and mash settles at the pit of your stomach, you suffer the consequences—the Steak ‘N Stein blues, as we call them.

Watching during our recent visit as my 11-year-old niece dug into her Clearman’s Combination plate (fried chicken, scallops with tartar sauce, and beef brochettes; $26.95) and beamed at each Shirley Temple cocktail set in front of her, I was reminded of my own 11-year-old self doing the same. It was then that I noticed a young couple sitting in the corner. He had a mohawk, she a leather jacket. And that gleam in his eye? I’ll bet you it was starving.

“Highlights of 1946” from Babyboomers.com 

CLEARMAN’S STEAK ‘N STEIN INN 9545 WHITTIER BLVD | PICO RIVERA 90660 | 562.699.4716 | CLEARMANSRESTAURANTS.COM | OPEN MON-WED 5-9:30PM; THURS-SAT 5-10PM; SUN 3-9PM | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED | DINNER FOR TWO $45-90 | FULL BAR | CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED

Tags: clearman's, Food, pico rivera, potatoes, steak, steak n stein