Star Rover Sound Introduces New Steak Night Dinners

There’s little doubt that the Nashville dining scene is pretty well covered when it comes to steakhouses, especially after the recent boom of new spots downtown. What we’re missing, though, is something between the high-end restaurants that cater to expense-account-spending conventioneers and the economy options at the Logan’s/Longhorn end of the spectrum.

That’s where Star Rover Sound aims to make its mark, with a new pop-up Steak Night on Fridays and Saturdays. Early returns have been very positive, so hopefully this will be something Star Rover continues for the foreseeable future. The West Texas-inspired honky-tonk/restaurant opened in late 2022 with a menu that leaned more toward elevated taqueria fare, but guess what — Nashville has a bunch of those too, and the team decided to try out a new concept.

Now the restaurant wants to focus more on locals looking for a less serious steak experience, especially if you’d like to catch a show in the acoustically excellent showroom afterward. Part of the same complex as The Optimist and Le Loup at 1400 Adams St. in Germantown, Star Rover is part of the restaurant group run by chef-restaurateur Ford Fry and is an expression of his love of the music and food that are part of his restaurant roots.

The Star Rover Steak Night is meant to be evocative of a 1970s West Texas steakhouse, and to me, it had the feel of being invited to Friday night ribeyes at a rural country club or a Moose lodge, both sources of fond memories from my younger days.

Here you’ll find no starched-shirt-wearing servers like at a Ruth’s Chris. The vibe is decidedly casual, with amiable servers in colorful T-shirts. Our server wore dangling jellyfish earrings that delighted us, but which I imagine wouldn’t have passed muster at the pre-service lineup at Jeff Ruby’s. 

If you’re not interested in the full steakhouse experience, the bar menu is still available for those who want to sit on a stool while enjoying crispy nacho chips served with outstanding salsas and queso or maybe an order of chicken tenders or a popular burger. But we were there for the full pull and asked for the steak menu as soon as we were seated in a red-checkered-tablecloth booth/table combo with a good view of the stage.

First off, a margarita, because this is Texas, right? The margs at all of Fry’s restaurants are exemplary, and this $10 dandy didn’t disappoint. Other drink options include a frozen Jack & Coke, and great deals on draft beers and wines by the bottle or by the glass. All the craft drafts are local with the exception of a $4 Coors Banquet, because sometimes you just need a really cold cheap beer. 

From that point on, there are very few decisions to be made, so you should just give in to the experience. Choose between five different steak options, including a chopped steak, filet, ribeye, skirt steak or a T-bone, along with a double-cut chicken breast that a friend I saw during dinner proclaimed as excellent — like it's worth coming back just for a chicken breast! Rare praise, indeed.

Depending on your specific chosen cut, most of the steak options cost between $43.95 and $45.95 with the outliers being the 14-ounce T-bone for $64.95 and the chopped steak and chicken both clocking in under $30. Now, these might seem more like middle- to upper-scale steakhouse prices until you realize that this isn’t an á la carte situation.

Each dinner includes an order of delectable Opti Rolls, swimming in a little pool of butter like the Quincy’s big fat yeast rolls of your fondest dreams, a salad (more on that later) and a thrice-fried delight of a 50/50 bottomless batch of onion rings and fries for the table. It was well-nigh on impossible not to devour the buttery rolls topped with a pinch of Maldon sea salt as soon as they hit the table, but I’ll offer a pro tip: Try to save them until your steak arrives. (More on that, too, later.) 

Enjoy your drink and the chill music pumping through the top-notch house sound system while you try your darndest not to eat those rolls. Let the salad course distract you — it's a delightfully unfussy offering of iceberg lettuce with thin slices of cucumber cut longways, bacon, red onions, lots of blue cheese and a surprisingly complex buttermilk-dill dressing. Clearly this was meant to emulate an old-school salad, and you have to admire the thought that went into creating something that appeared so low-brow but delivered such delightfully craveable flavor. I told my dining companion, “If you have a friend who says they don’t like salad, make them eat this one!”

All the steaks are cooked under a press on a constantly buttered flat-top grill, and both my flank steak and my companion's filet came out at the proper temp and color. Now here's the secret weapon, and the reason you need to hang on to that roll: Every steak is finished with a splash of jus made from veal stock that contributes an intense beefiness to the meat. 

Is the beef wagyu or super-prime Black Angus? No, but the restaurant never claims that it is. Instead, it’s a solid steak with great flavor thanks to how well it is prepared by the hard-working cook staff — and which just begs to be sopped up with a roll, so you can thank me later. Chef Fry and his staff spent a lot of time and many iterations trying to replicate a classic steak sauce, finally cheekily naming their version “A-2 Sauce.” I liked how there was a little bit of grainy spice in the plummy sauce that helped keep it from running off the steak like the commercial analog is wont to do. 

When I asked the manager about the effort to create the sauce, he shared that the secret ingredient they finally came up with after many tries was rehydrated raisins! Hmm, wouldn’t those just be … grapes? But I digress, and it’s time to talk about dessert.

Again, the choices are limited but excellent. The kitchen offers three kinds of pie — chocolate chess, coconut cream or apple — plus artisan soft-serve ice cream that can be a part of an á la mode situation or served with more of those shatteringly crispy fries to replicate a Wendy’s Frosty experience (or Fryce Cream.) I was already pretty stuffed, so I enjoyed only a few spoonfuls of the brown-butter soft-serve with saltine crunch and a little more Maldon. It was only my first time dining at Star Rover Steak House, but it won’t be my last. I’ll learn to pace myself better.

Steak Dinners at Star Rover are served Fridays and Saturdays, 5 p.m. until late, with live music beginning at 9. Make reservations at the restaurant’s website.