Copycat Peter Luger Porterhouse (The Famous Williamsburg Steak, Made at Home)
Prep time: 20 min (plus 45 min dry-salt rest, or 1-3 days for dry-brine) Cook time: 25 min Servings: 2
Peter Luger Steak House has been on Broadway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 1887. It has operated in essentially the same building, with essentially the same menu, and the same cash-only policy, for over 130 years. There is no music. There is no wine list to speak of. The walls are dark wood and beer signs. The tablecloths are checked. The servers are famously brusque. The New York Times gave it a scorching zero-star review in 2019, and it lost its Michelin star in 2022 — and it remains one of the hardest reservations in New York, because none of that has anything to do with the porterhouse.
The steak is the point. Everything else — the shrimp cocktail, the sliced tomatoes with Luger sauce, the German potatoes — exists in relation to the porterhouse. You order it for two, or three, or four. You specify no doneness other than medium-rare, because no other doneness is expected.
What makes the steak what it is begins on Monday mornings, when the same buyer who has been doing this for decades goes to the meat market and inspects individual sides of beef. He is selecting from USDA Prime beef — the highest grade of American cattle, assigned to the top two percent of beef by marbling — and then selecting the best of that. The porterhouses he chooses are dry-aged for 28 days in Luger’s own aging room in Williamsburg. During that time, enzymatic activity breaks down muscle proteins into peptides, concentrating beefy flavor and softening the texture in a way that no quick-tenderizing method replicates. The exterior loses moisture and develops a dry crust that, when it hits an 800-degree broiler, produces a sear no home kitchen can exactly match.
But you can get close. Not identical — the 28-day dry-aged Prime porterhouse and the commercial broiler at 900 degrees are hard ceilings at home — but close enough that the result is a genuinely great steak by any standard other than Luger’s own, which is the strictest standard in American steakhouse dining.
The Two Decisions That Matter Before You Cook
The cut. Ask your butcher specifically for a porterhouse, not a T-bone. A porterhouse has a filet portion at least 1.25 inches wide (measured from the bone to the outer edge of the tenderloin); a T-bone has less. The porterhouse is cut from the rear short loin, where the tenderloin is thicker. A 2-to-2.5-inch thickness is non-negotiable for this technique — thinner cuts cook through before the broiler can develop the crust without overcooking the interior.
Dry-aged vs. dry-brine. If you can find a dry-aged Prime porterhouse (28 days minimum from a specialty butcher), use it — the mineral, nutty depth of flavor that dry-aging develops has no real substitute. If you cannot, buy the best Prime porterhouse you can find and dry-brine it for 24 to 72 hours uncovered in the refrigerator before cooking. Dry-brining is not the same as dry-aging, but it is the single highest-leverage thing a home cook can do to improve a fresh steak: it concentrates surface flavor, draws out and then reabsorbs moisture with dissolved proteins, and most importantly dries the exterior so it sears rather than steams. A dry-brined Prime porterhouse, cooked correctly, is a very good steak. It is just not Luger.
The Technique: Sear, Broil, Slice on the Iron, Butter
Peter Luger’s broilers run at 800 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit continuously. A home broiler maxes at roughly 500 to 550 degrees on its highest setting — the element itself is hotter, but the ambient air in the oven is not. The workaround is to combine a cast-iron sear with the maximum broiler setting: the cast iron provides the direct-contact high heat that builds the crust from below, and the broiler provides radiant heat from above. It is not eight commercial broilers, but it is legitimately high heat from two directions simultaneously.
The other essential move is what happens after the steak comes out: the Luger cut. Strip off the bone, filet off the bone, both sliced perpendicular to the bone and fanned around it on the same hot cast iron, then cold butter on top and back under the broiler. What this accomplishes is threefold. It makes the steak shareable and manageable — a 2-inch porterhouse, eaten conventionally off the bone, is unwieldy. It exposes four cut surfaces to the broiler for a final sear. And it creates the butter pool at the bottom of the cast iron — the hot beefy drippings plus salted butter — that each slice gets dragged through before eating. That butter pool is what people who have been to Peter Luger describe when they try to explain why it is different.
The Temperature Window
Pull the steak at 120°F measured in the center of the strip side. The strip runs warmer than the filet because it is thicker and more exposed; the filet at 120°F strip will be 115°F, which is fine — the second broil after slicing will bring both up several degrees. Target final eating temperature of 130 to 135°F (medium-rare). If you want medium, pull the unsliced steak at 125°F. If your oven’s broiler is on the weaker side, check at 4 minutes rather than 5 — every broiler is different, and a steak this expensive should not be finished on a timer.
A note on resting: Peter Luger does not rest this steak. It comes from the broiler, gets cut and fanned, gets buttered and briefly broiled again, and arrives at the table sizzling. The conventional rest-the-steak advice exists because cutting too soon allows juices to run before they redistribute; here, the second broil step heats those juices back up and the butter pool provides additional moisture at the plate. Follow the restaurant’s method — serve immediately.
