Ely, NV Part Two: Dinner at the Cell Block Steakhouse

While in Ely, NV, celebrating my 50th birthday by driving a steam locomotive at the Nevada Northern Railway Museum (more information about that in this post), I also went out with my wife for a birthday dinner. Having done our research, the only restaurant Ely seems to have approaching fine dining is the Cell Block Steakhouse, located in the Jailhouse Casino. I like steak, and it looked like this was going to be our best—perhaps only—option for a celebratory meal at a nicer restaurant.

Ely is a small town, and the dining options are fairly limited. (On our first night, we went to a Mexican restaurant in a small, local casino. We were seated by a young girl who couldn’t have been much more than 10  or 11 years old, and she gave us what she described as the “American” menu, featuring only American dishes, because they were out of Mexican menus and she needed to get some brought back before she could give them to us.) I feel like that sums up the Ely culinary scene.

The Cell Block Steakhouse had three and a half stars on Yelp. I don’t really trust Yelp that much, and we didn’t have a lot of choices anyway, so we decided to give them a try. The atmosphere was kind of fun; the tables are set up inside of jail cells. 

Also in the cells were some Western/mining memorabilia, some vintage-looking posters, and a kind of creepy photograph. We were seated so my wife had the dude in the photo staring at her throughout the meal.

Two creepy dudes for the price of one!

Things were kept from feeling too grim by the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show posters on the other side of the window bars.

The appetizer menu was pretty much limited to mushroom caps, and we were more interested in having dessert, so we didn’t order any appetizers. Instead I started my meal with a cup of chicken vegetable soup, which was surprisingly flavorful. And they didn’t skimp on the vegetables!

My wife started with a salad, which she said was just fine.

For my entree, I went with the 16 oz prime rib. As regular readers of this blog may recall, prime rib tends to be a traditional birthday meal for me. This came with some vegetables, a baked potato, and “cowboy beans,” seen in the upper left corner of this photo. (They called them cowboy beans on the menu, but our server just called them baked beans.)

The beef was nicely cooked. It wasn’t as tender as the prime rib at Lawry’s, and wasn’t quite as flavorful as the smoked prime rib at Bob Taylor’s Ranch House (or my own smoked rib roast, for that matter). It was still just fine. The baked potato was, well, a baked potato, and the vegetables tasted pretty good, too. 

On the other hand, the “cowboy beans” were kind of weird and gross. The beans themselves weren’t very tender, as I have come to expect from baked beans. Instead of being in a more tomato-based sauce, they were in this almost greenish liquid, and it had kind of a weird taste. Neither my wife nor I really enjoyed them, and did not finish them.

My wife ordered the special for that evening, a New York strip with bourbon brown sugar mushrooms. I had been interested in that myself, and wanted to try it. Once she selected it, I knew I could go with the prime rib, and still get a taste. 

A better view of the baked/cowboy beans that came with my wife's dinner

Her steak was cooked properly, and she said it was tasty. I tried the mushrooms, and they were just sweet enough without being too sweet. And she also hated the baked beans.

For dessert, I ordered the chocolate lava cake (another favorite), and my wife ordered the carrot cake.

She said the carrot cake was delicious, and was very pleased to find it had pineapple in it.

The cake part of my dessert was very nice. It was moist and chocolatey. I liked that they served it with ice cream on the top instead of on the side, so I could more easily have my ice cream and cake at the same time. 

However, once I’d eaten enough of the ice cream, it was clear that the “molten lava” cake was just a chocolate bundt cake with hot fudge poured into the middle. I didn’t mind; it was still a yummy dessert. But that’s not a real molten lava cake; that’s how you fake one if you don’t know how to make one. 

Overall, it was a nice dinner, and well worth the price. I have to give them credit; being the only steakhouse in Ely, I wasn’t expecting all that much. Cell Block Steakhouse surprised me by being a pretty good mid-range steakhouse. If we found ourselves back in Ely, we would definitely go back.