M&S Grill

M&S Grill, the newest multi-unit concept from the high-end seafood leviathan McCormick & Schmick’s, recently debuted in the space vacated by the short-lived and unimpressive Chicago–based Nick & Tony’s. We’re addressing it in Second Helping because many of its dishes and recipes are on the menu at its older sister on Nicollet Mall.

The concept here is simple—steak house style plus a steak house menu, but with more choices in the seafood department. Throw in a few appetizers, such as sausage-stuffed mushrooms, add a few miniature entrées to the appetizer list, and slightly softer price points than the local luxury steak houses, and shazam! A restaurant that offers something for everyone, assuming there are people who want blackened chicken linguine.

The design is warm, with classic wooden oversized “snugs” lining one wall, the bar repositioned to the south side, and the lighting made brighter. And the room finally works. The service is a tad mechanical, thanks to a highly defined training program typical of chains of this size, but greetings are warm and the staff is eager to please.

The immensely talented chef Doug Tigges, a Goodfellow’s alum and former chef at La Toscana, has his stamp on the fare, if not the menu; you can tell someone in the kitchen really cares. Onion soup is superb, meats and seafood are perfectly cooked, salad dressings are seasoned and balanced (the blue cheese dressing on the wedge of iceberg is superb)—this seems simple, but it’s a masterstroke given the size of the menu, the seating capacity, and so on. Some of the plating is not to my taste: I would rather have cocktail sauce on the side rather than dolloped on my shrimp and colossal blue crab, ditto the 400 ingredients muddying a quartet of perfectly seared diver scallops. But the real reason to come to a grill of this type is steak.

M&S is built on its beef program—even though it only makes up 20 percent of the menu—but the steaks, sadly, are disappointing. The restaurant proudly offers “Old KC Brand certified dry-aged” steaks, a flavorless and mushy product that, despite the pedigree, is not in the top tier of dry-aged prime beef and doesn’t pretend to be—it just sounds close. KC Brand steaks lack the beefy taste and unctuous marbling that great steakhouse beef should deliver. At $34 for a ribeye, $37 for a T-Bone, and $28 for a strip, I would rather eat my beef at Morton’s or Manny’s.

But everything Tigges touches is tasty: the key lim pie makes for a great curtain call, and with a chef of his caliber my fingers are crossed that he can convince the corporate office in Portland that Old KC doesn't cut it in a town with plenty of great steakhouses.

50 S. 6th St., Mpls., 612-333-2345