Any restaurant basing its menu around quality steak and endless fries is guaranteed to pique my interest, and the dreamy IAPM mall’s The Cut is certainly no exception. The swanky, industrial steakhouse was designed by the VOL Group restaurateurs, who are also responsible for other Shanghai favorites such as Ultraviolet and Bar Rouge, so I was excited to see its appearance on this season’s China Restaurant Week offerings. After an exhaustive inquiry to make sure the Restaurant Week set menu did, indeed, include endless fries, we cabbed over to a polluted French Concession for some hearty, cholesterol-spiking fare. For 128RMB a person, we received a sizeable lunch of soup, salad, steak, and flourless chocolate cake. The soup was a flavorful, albeit somewhat diluted, version of the classic creamy baked potato. The salad was salad. The steak, a 200g Australian flat iron, which I ordered medium well because I am not classy enough for bloody meat, was perhaps a touch on the tough side but overall plenty satisfactory for the price. It was served on a beautiful, rustic cutting board and was accompanied by a head of roasted garlic, a small pot of The Cut’s secret truffle sauce, and a fully stocked caddy of flavored artisanal salts and homemade pickles.

The parade of meat toppings definitely seemed sort of gimmicky – a really good steak shouldn’t require so many distractions – but then again, I was originally drawn to the restaurant for its bottomless fries (which, to my disappointment, were served in portions large enough to make the thrill of requesting second and third helpings arbitrary).

The flourless chocolate cake, whose presence on the menu I had used to lure one of my fellow diners out of bed to make our early reservation, was decadent. It was the kind of thing my grandma would exclaim was too rich to eat more than a bite of, and then frown as I polished off multiple pieces. It came with a miniature fork and a shot glass of some sort of vanilla creme, which my lunch date lovingly mixed with the leftover salts and pickles like a five-year-old. The elegance of the dessert was probably lost on us, but the cake was a little dry so I didn’t feel too bad about it.

Service at The Cut was wonderful. A collection of attractive waiters tended to our infinite requests for 冰水 without complaint. The manager whipped me up a makeshift lemonade after I had ordered one without realising it wasn’t actually on the menu. The entrees came out at almost the same time, save for that of one member of our group, whom we suspected was being punished by the waitstaff for showing up to the restaurant fifteen minutes late. Although lunch at The Cut was tasty, if you’re interested in trying it out, try to make reservations before the end of Restaurant Week. Ordering the Restaurant Week meal off of the standard menu would run you 300+RMB (the steak alone is 200RMB), a price even the expert methodological ambiance-building and condiment-pairing of the VOL Group can’t really justify. This article was written by Isabella Baranyk. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Isabella Baranyk