Perry Perry, Quite Contrary: Why You Should Give This Steak Place a Try

Dallas needs another steak restaurant about as much as we need another football stadium. Or a hole in the head. Or another cardiac arrest due to too much intake of what you find in steak restaurants.

I know this as well as the next local, yet something tonight drew me to Perry’s on McKinney Avenue.

It was actually an accident. I was supposed to meet a friend at The Place at Perry’s, only a quarter mile from this location, but missed the mark and wound up here. It’s not like I really wanted to go in there, Perry’s being yet another ground-floor eatery in a mammoth granite office building Uptown (Ocean Prime, anyone?), surrounded by orange plastic tape and a moat-like construction ditch I can only assume has something  to do with their plumbing– or perhaps an extravagant shrub plan.

Lucky for me it was happy hour, or in their dialect Social Hour, and the menu was quite surprising for the area. This may be the thing Perry’s is currently known for, having just opened in April and is currently surviving the summer drought of dining out. A majority of their bottles and by-the-glass wines are half off from 4 to 6:30 p.m., as is their assortment of specialty martinis (they also have a pick three mini-martini special, but I’m unsure as to how much I could handle of that.) Select appetizers are also half off, including Prime Carpaccio, Cherry Pepper Calamari and Escargot (for the adventurous types.)

But beyond the menu, what Perry’s really does is make a visual splash with its decor. Having seen the modern/art deco version of the traditional upscale eatery more times than I’ve had hot dinners, pretty much nothing impresses me anymore, as jaded and stubborn as it sounds. But I urge you to take a walk around Perry’s, if only to use the lavoratories: stroll past the nooks and glass walled private rooms, beyond the wine library stocked high enough to make mountaineers nauseous, and check out the fit-for-royalty restooms, with inlaid flat screens in the mirrors and full, spacious stalls.

Perrfect.