Steakhouse.lu
Company
What sits next
to the steak.
A good sauce lifts a steak, the wrong one buries it. Here are the classics with their underlying principles, the sides that actually work — and wines that do not fight the meat.
The better the meat, the less sauce
Dry aged, wagyu or old-cow beef need coarse salt and nothing else. Sauce earns its place where flavour of its own is missing — with tenderloin, for instance.
Fat needs acidity
Chimichurri suits a marbled ribeye better than béarnaise: vinegar and herbs cut through the fat, while butter piles more on top.
Sauce goes beside it
Do not pour it over the steak — the crust goes soft. A spoonful next to the meat lets every guest dose it themselves.
The five classics
Sauce béarnaise
The classic steak sauce of French cooking: a reduction of white wine vinegar, shallots, tarragon and peppercorns, whisked with egg yolk and clarified butter over a bain-marie and finished with fresh tarragon and chervil. Temperature is the critical point: above 65 °C the yolk curdles.
Goes with: tenderloin, chateaubriand, striploin. Does not go with: dry aged.
Chimichurri
Argentina's answer: chopped parsley, oregano, garlic, chilli flakes, red wine vinegar and olive oil, left to infuse for at least an hour. No heat, no thickening — freshness is the entire point.
Goes with: flank steak, bavette, picanha, ribeye, anything off the grill.
Sauce au poivre
Coarsely crushed black pepper is sweated in the pan drippings, deglazed with cognac, reduced with veal stock and finished with cream. Anyone serious about it uses the fond from the steak pan — that is where the depth comes from.
Goes with: striploin, sirloin, tenderloin.
Café de Paris
A herb butter with more than twenty ingredients, created in Geneva: tarragon, capers, anchovies, mustard, curry, garlic, lemon and cognac among them. On a hot steak it melts into a sauce. Shop-bought versions are rarely good; made at home it keeps for months in the freezer.
Goes with: ribeye, striploin.
Red wine jus
Reduce veal stock with red wine and shallots by two thirds, pass it through a sieve and mount it with cold butter. Laborious, but the most elegant companion for tenderloin.
Sides that work
- Chips, fried twice. First cook them through at 140 °C, let them cool, then finish at 180 °C. The intermediate step makes the difference.
- Baked potato with sour cream. The best choice with dry aged, because it covers nothing up.
- Potato gratin. Takes time, but gets along with any sauce.
- Grilled pointed cabbage or chicory. Bitterness as a counterweight to the fat.
- Green salad with a sharp vinaigrette. The underrated classic.
- Fried onions and bone marrow. When it is allowed to be lavish.
- Sautéed mushrooms. Umami meets umami — works particularly well with leaner cuts.
Wine with steak
The basic rule: tannin binds fat. A tannic red seems softer alongside a fatty steak, and the steak in turn seems less heavy. Very fruity, low-tannin wines quickly come across as thin next to it.
| With the cut | Recommendation | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ribeye, entrecôte | Bordeaux, cabernet sauvignon, malbec | tannin against fat |
| Tenderloin | pinot noir, red Burgundy, light Rioja | finesse rather than force |
| Striploin | syrah, Côtes du Rhône | spice meets firm bite |
| Dry aged | aged Bordeaux, Rioja Reserva, Barolo | maturity meets maturity |
| Flank, bavette, chimichurri | malbec, tempranillo | fruit against the acidity of the sauce |
| Wagyu | champagne, full-bodied white, sake | acidity cuts through the fat |
From Luxembourg: a robust pinot noir from the Moselle works surprisingly well with tenderloin and with cuts from pasture-raised cattle — and a dry Crémant de Luxembourg is the most obvious local choice for carpaccio and tartare.
Beer instead of wine
A dark, malty beer — bock, dunkel, stout — picks up the roasted notes of the crust. Very hoppy IPAs, by contrast, often clash with seared meat: bitterness from hops plus bitterness from the crust quickly becomes too much.