The federal government may still be reeling from Saturday's 16-inch snowfall, but the dancers at Virginia strip club Crystal City Restaurant have been stripping all the way through the snowstorm.

A tipster sent in this photo of the CCR on Saturday, which was very much open-for-business despite the weekend weather, which left most other local businesses in shut-down mode. (You can't make it out, but the pink sign on the door reads "yes, we're open").

Personally, I'm hoping the restaurant's famed "CCR girls"—on, Elvira, Kiki, Sheena, and Sparkles!—received some sort of special commendation (and some hefty tips) for stripping down to their G-strings on a day when the remainder of the D.C. metro area refused to leave their homes in full-on snow gear.

 Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

OK, the food: The plate arrived looking like a snapshot from my own private eating hell as a child. I grew up in Omaha, beef capital of America, and yet my family couldn't cook a steak to save their souls. I remember chewing and chewing and chewing at some overcooked, underseasoned piece of meat — until I would give up and just spit the nasty wad out in my napkin. Or just hold it in my cheek, like a chipmunk, until I could spit it out in the toilet.

CCR's gray slab of beef brought back all those memories. It didn't help that the New York strip was about as thick as a book of poetry. Its sides didn't inspire much hope either: a stack of extra-wide steak fries that looked barely cooked and a bowl of sliced green beans, previously frozen or canned if I were a betting man.

The meat's thinness, in fact, reminded me more of skirt steak than strip, even though it clearly was the latter. There also wasn't a char mark within a mile of that steak, which means the protein likely never came in contact with a grill. I was not looking forward to my first bite.

Now, I don't want to oversell this, but let me say this about the first bite: It was far better than anything I could have imagined, particularly at that price, particularly  with its underwhelming appearance. The steak was well-seasoned, the salt and pepper bringing out the meager flavor of that thin cut. The seasoning, in fact, was the make-or-break element of the meat. Those bites not sprinkled with enough S&P were lifeless.

I have absolutely nothing kind to say about the sides, other than the fact they were less embarrassing to stare at than the women on stage.

Crystal City Restaurant

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I'm going to do this thing right, I'm going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

I clearly need work on my strip-club etiquette.

The waitress here wasn't required to perform her job wearing lacy underwear. She wore a short skirt and a casual top, looking no different than, say, someone working the tables at an Eastern Shore crab shack or a sports bar in Bethesda. She handed me a menu and left me alone to review its many choices. 

I opted for the most dangerous entree: the New York strip steak dinner special, available on Wednesdays. The six-ounce strip (ugh!) comes (double ugh!) with your choice of potato, and a vegetable side. All this for the low, low price of $5.99.

I felt like I was in Las Vegas, back before all the celebrity chefs arrived and the only gustatory attractions were the all-you-can-eat buffets for $5.99 a head. The lines for those buffets could be longer than the queue to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland. 

My memories of those buffets are not too kind — slices of roast beef that had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, a broad and lifeless array of vegetables, and a chocolate cream pie for dessert. The shit was designed, I figured, to get you back to the gaming tables pronto.

I wasn't sure what the $5.99 New York strip steak dinner was designed to do, given the attraction of Crystal City, one presumes, has nothing to do with what's on the plate. But nonetheless, the management has one stipulation for its ultra-cheapo steak special:

Dine-in only.