The Steakhouse of My Dreams is a special place -- but you can't go get a reservation.   It is my secret sanctuary. I repair there when the world is too much. Let the buxom belles of Avenue B ignore me; let editors repulse my pitches, and copy crones mangle my best phrases. I see what my life is like. I know that my Cadillac has a broken grill, and a big crack in the windshield. Indian boys pelt my windows with durian. I don't care. I just close my eyes, and I see that place of my most fevered meat-dreams.

Here is what it is like.

All the meat there would be singularly great, each slab seared to an alluring mahogany, and each surface only hinting at the robust, distinctive tangle of notes inside it . A strip steak from one ranch would taste as different from that of another ranch as a merry Beaujolais differs from a heady old Burgundy; and both would differ as much from a rib steak as red wine does from white.

The meat, meanwhile, would be sourced by the most exacting infrastructure back to the Land: a place where cattlemen raise their bovine charges with the care of loving parents, and the stun line is a place of peace and serenity. None of the beef comes from commodity purveyors, those well-meaning men who deal in beef by the ton, and sell ten times more steak for which they can personally vouch. Rib steaks are served bone-on, from the sixth or seventh rib, with a massive spinalis dorsaii lip, plump and bold, and ringed with rugged succulent fat. The vivid, precious intercostal flesh still hews to the bone, and in fact it is the gnawing of that that massive, curved arc of bone that will provide the meal's coda. Strip steaks are served with tails attached. Braised brown short ribs, dense and unctuous, arrive in high clay pots. Skirt steaks dangle off the edges of oval platters, their tips hanging in air like sidelocks.

Each of these steaks comes, unadorned, on a plate with neither butter nor herbs, sauce nor seasonings. Not even a garnish accompanies it. But surrounding the steak, on all sides, are copious portions of the time-approved side dishes: tempura-battered onion rings, creamed-spinach redolent of black truffles, and -- most importantly -- massive platters of bronze and buttery hash browns, scattered with coarse salt. The waiters would be neither gruff Germans, who presume to order for you, or sinuous model-actresses, whose very presence serves to shame the act of gluttony. Instead they would be alert and obsequious men, in the mold of knowledgeable wine stewards, with distinguished academic backgrounds in physiology, gastronomy, and animal husbandry. All would be able to discourse on command on the niceties of grass feed, "slow-twitch" musculature, or the effects of dry aging on a palate polluted by marijuana and profanity. They would show up when you needed them, answer your questions or bring you drinks, and then disappear.

In the steakhouse of my dreams there is no waiting. You can contemplate your choices in tranquility, poring over the menu and parsing the meaning of the meat. But when you order, it shows up with minutes, and is whisked away at the moment you eat the last bite of stray fat. There is no check; a chip implanted in your collar serves as a kind of easy pass, debiting your bank account the moment you pass back out through the restaurant's pearly gates.

These, you will understand, are only the barest rudiments of my dream. There is much I haven't told you, that I've reserved for my own secret savoring. There is the bottomless pot of pudding, served demurely behind a conical screen, so that you can gobble the stuff down away from the prying eyes of others; the La-Z-Boy recliners in which you eat, your legs and lumbar regions supported by ingenious hidden springs; and of course, the appetizers, a rotating assortment of classic New York meat treats including, but not limited to, David Chang's pork-belly sliders; to the char siu bao at Sun Say Kai; Orhan Yegan's baby lamb chops at Sip-Sak; the arancini at Joe's Suprette in Carroll Gardens; and a slider trio platter jointly authored by David Burke, the Shake Shack, and Shnack. Anna Klinger's marrow-and-red wine risotto might provide a mid course. Or maybe the veal chop from Sparks, rushed by ambulette, and served as a kind of diplomatic exchange. My father, in what was to him the steakhouse of dreams, used to sometimes order lamb chops as an appetizer at Peter Luger; this was before the invention of bacon, and....come to think of it....how can I work bacon into this fantasy?

Let me start again. I sit down in the Steakhouse of my dreams, and they bring me toasted Kossar bialys shmeared with Normandy butter. Or, I sit down, and they bring out an anatomy chart, and ask me to mark off the edible trajectory of the evening's meal, ordered by the progress through the primal cuts. Or the chef offers to deglaze the roasting pan at my table, pooling the steak's precious bodily fluids into a concentrated elixir, which I can then dip my bread into....or maybe.....

Ah, it's no use! The steakhouse of my dreams can never be held in my mind for very long. Like the appetites it tries to tantalize, it can never be fulfilled.  The dream, once aroused, leads only to gray and prosaic awakenings.