Omar S.
Yelp
Creed's Seafood and Steaks, surrounded, as it is, by the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Benjamin Franklin Highway and a busy local road, simultaneously affirms the notions that you never know where you'll find the good stuff and that you can't keep a good [restaurant] down.
I don't suppose that the restaurant's early owners expected that they'd need to survive aggressive suburban sprawl, but their successors did, and so they have.
What was first a home, and then, for decades, a "milk bar" (a sort of dairy-centric diner) was converted over time into a steak house, offering increasingly fine fare and service.
The result, today's Creed's Seafood and Steaks, offers those things as part of an excellent menu prepared by Executive Chef John Talbot, who makes good use of high-quality provisions purchased from mostly-local suppliers, who, interestingly, are shouted out in a section of the restaurant's website entitled "They've Got Our Back" - something I don't believe I've ever seen done by a high-end establishment.
Dinner was expensive. I paid $240 for two meals of oysters, clams, salad, crabcake, steak, and dessert, no wine. That's pricey, but Creed's delivered value: our food was marvelous, and our server, Sam, was not just good at his job, but by dint of prior experience as a chef was able to advise me as I wondered my way through the menu.
Finally, a note about the steak: I've had good ones and I've sent some back (looking at you, Morton's), but ordering steak always strikes me as a bit lazy. I think of it as highly-priced comfort food, and I can't remember the last time I was surprised by a steak.
Until I ate at Creed's.
The meat was of superb quality and it was cooked to the proper temperature, but the remarkable thing about it was its crust. Not simply seared or charred, the steak seemed to have been basted with a rich, herbaceous sauce, then finished in a skillet, so that its crust didn't simply encase the medium-rare inside, but instead enhanced the flavor of every bite.
That's a neat trick, and one worth paying for.