Restaurant Review: M. Wells Steakhouse in Long Island City, Queens M. Wells Steakhouse The steakhouse is in trouble. Not financial trouble, because new ones keep opening, but spiritual trouble. Its soul is unwell. Because many other restaurants now offer better beef, the steakhouse serves little purpose except as a stage set for the dwindling number of occasions that require men to bond by spending money and consuming red meat together. Sensing that it has lost its swagger, chefs have tried to revive the genre by applying their culinary-school training. Their knifework is geometric, their potato recipes are French, their menus prettified with appetizers like diced raw bluefin under droplets of Ligurian olive oil. Each dish may be a delight on its own terms, but the whole approach is wrong. Trying to save the steakhouse by adding sashimi is like trying to improve a martial arts movie by casting Gwyneth Paltrow. We all know that there's a problem, but only Hugue Dufour and Sarah Obraitis seem to have any idea how to fix it. Husband and wife, chef and manager, the two came to New York a few years ago and began waging a merciless attack on all that is fastidious and fussy in modern dining. First was the 18-month run of their gonzo diner, and then their "dinette" inside MoMA PS 1. Their most recent assault on propriety is M. Wells Steakhouse, which opened in November in a converted auto-body shop in Long Island City, Queens. A steak worthy of a Flintstone: the tomahawk chop. M. Wells Steakhouse needs some fixing itself. Discipline is not its strong suit, for better and for worse. It can lurch from magnificence to sloppiness, from inspired fever dreams to inarticulate notions that aren't ready to leave the kitchen. One thing that needs improvement is the steak. This isn't as fatal as you'd think, because when M. Wells Steakhouse succeeds, it does so in a deeply satisfying fashion, by feeding the lust in your gut for a meal that is not just a dinner but a feast. Mr. Dufour and Ms. Obraitis get this. They know that we go to steakhouses to feel more alive. They respond appropriately, even if that sometimes means feeding us enough to kill us. Let other chefs precisely engineer 130-degree steaks with immersion circulators and digital thermometers. Mr. Dufour has gone back to the cave, grilling meats over a crackling wood fire. This makes the steaks smoky, of course, and a little uneven, slightly overdone in spots, the meat seasoned with the scorch of burning fat. It's an imperfect steak, and those imperfections are just the kind of the premodern thrill that makes a traditional steakhouse great. When we go to a steakhouse, we want to wrestle with our own appetites, to learn their exact dimensions. Luckily, confrontational portions are the way Mr. Dufour signs his name. I have eaten whole tasting menus that were less filling than the appetizers at M. Wells Steakhouse. French onion soup is more solid than liquid, stuffed with poached pork belly and a marrow bone (tiny spoon provided) that takes the natural beefiness of onion broth to its logical conclusion. Solomon Gundy, a dish that takes pickled smelts as its starting point, adds half a potato waffle, a huge outcropping of crème fraîche and a landslide of intensely crunchy trout eggs. If winter is getting you down, I'd prescribe one Solomon Gundy, to be taken at the bar with a glass of Champagne. Étienne Guérin, imported from Montreal to be the wine director, has built a winningly nondogmatic list that is mostly French but doesn't turn up its nose at a well-made retsina. Less photogenic but just as wonderful are the sweetbreads blanquette in an unnervingly delicious expanse of white sauce. The blanquette is also offered as a side dish, but only the appetizer version is served on a plateful of mashed potatoes. There are two very good salads as well. Do not be naïve enough, however, to think that you will be eating lightly by ordering the romaine Caesar under a heap of grated Parmesan, as fluffy and white as the frosting on a coconut cake, or the improbably crisp grilled iceberg wedge in a blue cheese dressing speckled with bacon and candied pecans. Ready for your pork chop tower? Here come a half-dozen thin-cut grilled chops piled up, with a salty pat of anchovy butter between each one, as if it were a stack of pancakes. It's deranged and wonderful. With other main courses, though, we have to face the unpleasant reality that dinner at M. Wells Steakhouse can at times resemble "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," that all this heroic swaggering comes with a certain amount of swaying and weaving and stumbling over the furniture, gastronomically speaking. A Moroccan tagine with soft hunks of full-flavored lamb was as sweet as Jell-O salad. A torpedolike lobster roll tasted of its bun, and not much else. In the caviar sandwich, the pop and brine of what must have been a fat helping of sturgeon roe from Florida were muffled between two fried planks of Texas-toast-size bread. I kept thinking of what I could have done with that much caviar, or the $50 I'd just spent. I wasn't much happier paying $17 for the bone-in burger, a dense bundle of ground beef on the very low end of the juiciness and tenderness scales. The dish, with a swoosh of bone jutting out from within the bun, is a hit on Instagram. Too bad I couldn't feed it to my camera. The skin of the trout au bleu, netted from a tank in the kitchen, conked on the skull with firewood, gutted and slipped into a tangy court bouillon, is meant to turn blue, eponymously. Does it, though? Hard to tell, because it was always covered up by fingerling potatoes, cabbage and tartar sauce. The flavor and feel of the trout seemed terrific, but with so many things competing for attention, that was hard to tell, too. And while the fire does great things to the steaks, the meat didn't always live up to it. The grass-fed Kansas City strip was all elastic muscle and very little flavor. The somewhat retiring chateaubriand needed the help of a sauce, but sauces are sold separately, and nobody offered us one. The best steak I ate at M. Wells Steakhouse came from a neighbor's tomahawk chop, grilled on a whole rib almost the size of a goalie's stick. It could have served six, so we bartered for a taste. The meat gushed with juices and shiny, delicious fat. M. Wells Steakhouse was in the works for about two years. Still, I sometimes got the sense that Ms. Obraitis and Mr. Dufour are making it up as they go along. They wanted a dessert cart but decided to keep it stationary, requiring customers to walk over to it to select one of Bethany Costello's sweets. I can save you the trip: Get the tall pile of cheesecake or the Paris-Brest, which crackles with scraps of hazelnut brittle. It's a crazy way to run a restaurant. And if Mr. Dufour can fix the trout dish and find a steak that has the tomahawk chop's intensity for less than $200, I hope it stays that way. A great steakhouse should make you feel a little insane.