Gut Instinct: What's the Scores?

Mmm...meat by the pound.

“What are you doing Wednesday?” my girlfriend asks, eager to spend quality moments with me since work has made our schedules incompatible all summer.

“I’m…busy,” I say, deflecting the naked truth.

“Doing what?” she asks. This is how conversations work: brief exchanges of information.

“I’m going to eat steak at Scores.”

“Excuse me?”

“The strip club. They supposedly have really good steak.” I omit that Chelsea’s Scores (536 W. 28th St., betw. 10th & 11th Aves., 212-868-4900) was shuttered last year due to a tiny problem called prostitution.

New ownership renovated the topless club and installed Will Savarese (Le Cirque, La Crémaillère) as top toque. It’s a new day at the nudie parlor.

“And this is for work,” she says. Work is my catchall excuse. Drunk on Lucky 13’s dollar beer? Work. Sumo-gorged on Bamboo Pavilion’s feather-light fiery fish? Work. Refusing to wear pants? Work, work, work. Inspiration requires unexpected forms.

“Just keep your pants on,” she says, which I take as her blessing.

Wednesday comes. I’m running late. I slapdash out my door, forgetting my umbrella—a silly move given this sodden summer.When I depart the subway, the blue sky has turned corpse-gray. Thunder cracks.

Down come cats and dogs, soaking me to my striped socks. Maybe Mother Nature doesn’t want me to see bare breasts, I think, as I swim through the downpour.

“You got a little wet,” my pal José says by way of greeting. He’s shaking an umbrella like a wet pooch. I should strangle José, but it’s his first visit to New York since moving to Texas. A wife, a baby, you know the score. But neither is present tonight, giving José free reign. Within reason.

Minutes later, Aaron strolls up, also holding an umbrella. “My wife said I could look, but I can’t touch,” Aaron informs us. “She doesn’t want to have to cut anyone.”

“Seems fair,” I say, as we enter the pleasure palace. Scores slinks across 10,000 square feet, encompassing an LED-lit runway, multiple stages topped with sensuous strippers, gaudy light shows and private rooms aplenty.

We’re led to a raised platform housing Robert’s Restaurant. It’s the companion to the Penthouse Executive Club’s Robert’s Steak House, and they both peddle flesh of the highest caliber. “Concentrate, guys,” I say, pointing at the menu, sighing. Bringing married men to a strip club destroys attention spans like giving preschoolers candy. After tearing gazes from the surrounding flat-screens (featuring the strippers, dancing nearby), we come to a carnivorous consensus. We order. We sip drinks—a well-made Manhattan, a toofizzy old-fashioned, a potent gin-and-tonic. We watch. From our perch, it’s like watching a baseball game from a skybox. The dancers are mere window dressing for the main event—dinner.

Our rainbow heirloom-tomato salad is farm-fresh goodness, given creamy contrast by the mozzarella. The frisée salad is a textural toss of sweet pecans and pungent blue cheese, which dooms me to bad breath. Not that you want nice breath tonight, I envision my girlfriend saying, a voice I erase with whiskey.

“I love tomatoes,” José says, watching a woman contort on TV.

“I’m a steak man myself,” I say, as we receive a table-dwarfing platter of sliced rib-eye, centers as pink as rabbits' noses.

The dry-aged steak is dense and rich, with a mineral tang so flavorful I need no béarnaise. The lamb chops match the steak’s juiciness, amped up with tangy Moroccan spices. And the fries are playful indulgences: matchstick taters sprinkled with an everything bagel’s classic toppings and then submerged in smoky paprika aioli. They’re equally fun to eat and ogle, a sentence that can cause no shortage of trouble in a strip club.

“Would you like some dessert?” the maître d’ asks. He opens a menu. A curvaceous blonde, poured into her shimmery dress, sits down. He smiles. I turn the color of beets, as do my now-awkward companions.

“Would you like a private tour?” she asks.

Um. Well. No. I’m as scared as the little lamb I just ate. A woman as tanned as leather sits on my chair. Her briefs sparkle, as does her filled-to-bursting top. She squishes against my shoulder. I inch into my chair’s far corner, making myself as small as I feel.

“Perhaps you need more to drink,” the blonde says. She’s right; four more cocktails, and all bets are off. It’s my curse. It’s every man’s curse. But now, we’ve just had a dinner as lovely as our relationships with our respective women. I mumble an excuse— “I’ve got work”—and we leave our baser desires behind.

“I was too full for a lap dance anyway,” José says, offering up a far manlier excuse.