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What Valentino’s is

Valentino’s is an Italian restaurant that takes its steak seriously, on South Broadway in downtown Lake Orion. Chef Louie took the kitchen over in July 2012 and rebuilt it as a family-owned and operated Italian room — something Lake Orion has very little of.

The steak to order

The dish that belongs on this list is the filet mignon sautéed with wild mushrooms in a sherry wine cream sauce, finished with truffle oil and asiago. That is an Italian-American treatment rather than a chophouse one — sauced and finished in the pan instead of fired dry over high heat — and it is the right way to cook a filet, which has tenderness but not much fat to protect it from a hard sear.

The other beef dish worth knowing is Cajun beef tips alla Sophia. Between them, steak, veal, chicken, pasta and seafood all get real menu space, and there are house-made crab cakes.

Worth knowing

The room is open Tuesday through Sunday for dinner only, from 4pm, and closed Mondays. If you want a steakhouse experience in the strict sense — dry-aged beef, bare cuts, a butcher’s board — this is not that. If you want a filet cooked with care in a family-run Italian dining room, it is exactly that.

Prices

Valentino’s does not publish a machine-readable priced menu, so SteakMap has no verified figures to quote. Grade and aging are not published, and we make no claim about either.

Read the guide to the best steakhouses in Michigan.