The Legend of New England Steak Tips

Staring at a plate of steak tips in the North Shore, I was reminded of the universality of the immigrant experience.

Eddie Huang is a Taiwanese-American multi-hyphenate who has made his cultural mark as an author, chef, restaurateur and director. A former attorney, he later turned to cooking and opened BaoHaus, a Taiwanese bun shop in New York City. He is widely known for his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, which was adapted into a popular ABC sitcom in 2015. Huang also hosted the Viceland show Huang’s World, which explored cultural identities through the lens of food. In 2016, he published his second book, Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China. In 2024, he directed, produced and starred in the documentary Vice is Broke.

It looks simple, humble, perhaps even underwhelming, but if you spend time in New England, you know what this is: a steak tip.

I’d never heard of steak tips until my wife picked me up from Amtrak and told me, “My Mom put Senna (our son) to sleep so we’re going to get steak tips.”

Regional foods like New England steak tips, a North Shore Beef, mumbo sauce from DC, gator tails with swamp sauce in Florida, Carolina BBQ with vinegar sauce, Chengdu rabbit heads, traditional sweet wood smoked jerk chicken, Memphis-style BBQ Spaghetti, etc. are my favorite genre of food.

There’s nothing better than pulling up to a barbecue in a secondary or tertiary city where an Unc or Auntie is in the backyard with an off-cut of meat and a secret sauce.

There’s nothing worse than seeing that particular dish end up at the Cheesecake Factory.

But there’s also nothing better than the feeling after months of living abroad -somewhere like Beijing or Shanghai - when you duck into The Cheesecake Factory for the worst version of that beloved regional food because you simply need a hit of Americana realizing that Shakespeare really knew some shit when he said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

People debate the 100 best restaurants or dishes every few seasons, but anyone who has ever watched Ratatouille knows there is no match for the combination of food + memories. When food can trigger a memory and bring up feeling in the diner, that’s it. Game over. The restaurant has successfully pulled the sword out of stone.

In my experience, the regional food of your youth is always the most powerful because every single moment that dish was physically present in your life rises up like a 2025 climate crisis flash flood ironically distracting you from end of times bullshit to remind you how wonderful this world is.

For most New Englanders it comes as a shock when they come of age, venture from home, walk into a sports bar and realize that steak tips are not on the menu. They go to the butcher looking for loin flap only to be told they’ve ground it all into hamburger.

Steak tips are ubiquitous on New England menus as important as clam chowder or a caesar salad, but like jerk chicken in Jamaica or Oh-ah-mi shwa in Taiwan, they are regional delicacies born out of struggle and necessity that people in this particular region of the world created to solve a problem.

On every cow, there is about 6 to 7 pounds of what butchers call “loin flap”. French restaurants get away with selling it as a “Bavette Steak”, but Greek immigrants in the North Shore discovered that it took very well to dressings so they started to marinate it with Italian Dressing, Worcestershire, A-1, and sold them as steak tips.

While steak tips aren’t as soigné as bavette, these Greek immigrants made a lot more money than French Cafes selling bavette steak specials with loin flap leftovers because they chose accessibility over sophistication. By creating a “steak” offering for working class bar patrons who couldn’t afford Ribeyes and NY Strips, the Greeks in turn created an opportunity to make a living for themselves.

The first spot that Natashia took me to get steak tips was The Lazy Dog. We pulled up about 45 minutes before they closed and quickly ordered steak tips with rice pilaf. As we waited for the steak tips, the bartender hosting trivia night asked the final question of the evening: “What fruit has only one seed?”

“Avocado.” said Natashia.

Seeing an opportunity to be right for once in our relationship, I shouted, “Peach!”

Everyone at the bar wrote their answers down on a piece of paper and turned it in.

A few minutes later, as the bartender tallied up the entries, the steak tips arrived.

I took one bite and wasn’t immediately sold.

The texture felt like a cross between hanger steak and bottom round, which gets no one excited. There wasn’t much intermuscular fat or marbling and it was served in large chunks, but something about the marinade and the char of the steak kept me coming back.

After a few bites, I started to appreciate the bouncy, chewy, sofa cushion-esque texture of this muscular cut contrasted by the char from a hard sear. Like flank steak, tri-tip, or skirt steak, there is joy in the struggle to chew and digest. The marinade was also distinctly familiar but completely foreign. Something was going on that I couldn’t put my finger on and my obsession with steak tips began.

Halfway through dinner, the bartender announced, “A fruit with only one seed is… a peach.”

“Ah fuck I said avocado!” shouted the woman across the bar who lost trivia night on that question.

I said nothing and plowed through rice pilaf.

“You like the tips?” asked Natashia.

“Obsessed.”

“What do you think is in the marinade?”

“It tastes like Korean barbecue cut with Worcestershire sauce.”

“Really? Let me try.”

She took a bite, pondered it, and agreed.

“I could see that. You should ask my Mom. She sells marinade to a lot of places.”

Paula, my mother-in-law, works in food service and sells tips as well as marinades to a lot of the bars and grilles on the North Shore that serve steak tips, but as her generation gets older these spots are starting to disappear so I became curious.

“Paula would it be crazy if the Lazy Dog is marinading their tips in something like Korean BBQ and Worcestershire?”

“Not at all. A lot of my customers use this sauce called Aw-Sum Sauce.”

“Aw-Sum Sauce?”

“Yeah, it’s this Chinese thing called Aw-Sum Sauce.”

I checked out the ingredients: high fructose corn syrup, water, salt, soybean paste, and immediately recognized it as a simplified Char-Siu marinade.

“Oh shit, so a lot of these New England Steak Tips are basically Char Siu Sirloin Flap.”

“Yup.” said Paula.

“Wait, that makes sense cause The Newbridge Cafe has a really red sauce too.” said Natashia.

I went on Reddit to research steak tips and found that the most popular spots in order were: Champions in Peabody, The Lazy Dog, and The Newbridge Cafe, which had been open the longest. I also found an incredible article by Rachel Leah Blumenthal confirming the Greek immigrant origin story beginning at the Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus, which was the steakhouse of Natashia’s childhood.

When Natashia and Paula told me that Greeks invented steak tips, I wanted to believe them, but due to the sheer amount of things that Greeks claim to have invented, I needed confirmation from Rachel Leah Blumenthal.

The next day, Paula had to work so we didn’t have a car to drive to either Champions or The Newbridge Cafe, but everywhere we ate, I ordered steak tips. At their neighborhood seafood restaurant, Dockside, I got steak tips with fries. From a random bar on DoorDash, steak tips on salad. Three days later, I’d eaten 6 versions of steak tips all different, all either vaguely East Asian, doused in A-1, Italian dressed, or with some type of re-imagined Worcestershire.

“The Newbridge Cafe has my favorite tips.” said Natashia.

We pulled up to The Newbridge for steak tip date night and I immediately fell in love with the aesthetic and imagine that this image could be found on the Wikipedia page for “Brick Shit House”.

They have all kinds of tips at The Newbridge: steak tips, pork tips, turkey tips, lamb tips, and sausage with your choice of fries, rice, or broccoli.

I got the pork tips and steak tips with garlic broccoli while Natashia got steak and sausage tips with fries. I took a couple bites of the broccoli and my intentions to be healthy had led me down the wrong path so I immediately ordered rice.

I ordered my tips medium rare, which was a mistake. When eating steak tips, you need to forget every thing you know about eating steak because the flavor of the marinade can only be activated if you completely hammer each tip.

If you are going to eat steak tips in New England, do what Paula does when ordering anything that walked and tell them to “burn it”.

When you see the pork tips, you can see the color of char-siu that can be disguised on red meat but it was clear what was going on. They were applying char-siu to the steak tips and a memory I’d completely forgotten went off in my head.

When we opened Baohaus in 2009, Chinese-Taiwanese people only red cooked pork, but I had a lot of homies that were “no pork on my fork” so I would braise skirt or hanger and call it “steak” since it sounded more upscale. It was on the menu as the King Jaffe Joffer Bao until skirt and hanger steak prices went through the roof around 2012 making it impossible to offer it at a price that made sense in a bao.

But to see a similar innovation through the lens of Greek immigrants on the North Shore made it feel right. Like I had been on this path with Natashia and her family all along.

Obviously I was projecting all of this meaning, but as a parent with an interracial child, these moments bring a lot of joy and expunge a lot of the anxiety about my son’s identity. I don’t speak to Natashia about it much, but I remember how the Chinese kids made fun of the mixed kids at Chinese School with orange hair calling them bananas or twinkies. I remember how my Mexican homies called the half white “amigos” casper and I’m very very aware that the best part of dominoes is when people go in on the light skinned homies.

The shit is type funny and absolutely canonical American humor, but I’ve always gotten to laugh at it because my 23&Me is 99.999999% Chinese. To me, twinkie, banana, light skinned jokes were one of the few get-backs being Chinese in this country. It was my time to tell the god damn joke, but as a Dad I’m over here worrying about someone telling my kid he got hair the color of Tang in 8 years.

Senna’s, identity is significantly more complex and it’s something he will have to figure out or ignore. Hate it or love it, Confucius was a very intelligent man, but I will not make Senna read the Analects like my parents did. Maybe by the time he is in high school, we will be post-racial. HA. I doubt it, but I find peace and solidarity in the FACT that none of us can afford steak when we arrive in this country.

You eat tips, you eat flap, you eat bao, you live in East Williamsburg or West Bushwick, which are also made up names but you make it your neighborhood or your family or your steak; and that to me is a very universal immigrant experience.