After 10 years of reviewing restaurants, I find that an unusual menu or a particularly fetching decor can still surprise me. It's rare, however, that a restaurant causes my jaw to drop. But that's just what happened a few weeks ago, when I walked into Chops for the first time.

From the outside, the place looks like a thousand other restaurants situated on the margin of rural farmland and encroaching suburbia: sprawling brick structure at a country crossroads, surrounded by a parking lot full of pickup trucks. Surely, I thought, this is just another mid-level steak-seafood-pasta joint.

Inside, the decor -- a pleasant enough assemblage of brass rails and faux Craftsman chandeliers reminiscent of a chain hotel restaurant -- did nothing to change my mind. Then, as I stood just inside the door, I turned to my right. That's when my jaw dropped.

There, behind floor-to-ceiling glass doors, hung massive cuts of beef, their darkened surfaces a dead giveaway of dry aging. I had found the only restaurant in the Triangle - and, to my knowledge, one of only a few in the Southeast - that dry ages its own beef.

If you're familiar with this rare delicacy, you'll appreciate that my discovery is the beefeater's equivalent to finding hidden treasure. Dry aging, under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity, concentrates the flavor of beef and imparts a nutty, faintly gamy taste prized by steak aficionados. The process is time-consuming and expensive, which is why you generally find dry-aged beef only on the menus of super-premium steakhouses in major cities. And you pay dearly for it.

At Chops, you'll pay $24 for a dry-aged center cut filet and a dollar more for a 24-ounce porterhouse. A 14-ounce rib-eye, the most popular cut at Chops, will set you back $19. Elsewhere, you'd be lucky to get equivalent cuts for twice those prices. And that doesn't include side dishes, which at most upper-tier steakhouses are sold a la carte. At Chops, the tariff includes freshly baked bread and two side dishes. I'm particularly fond of the steak fries, white cheddar mashed potatoes and snap-tender whole string beans.

Granted, Chops uses choice-grade beef, which is one rung down the quality ladder from the top-of-the-line USDA prime the top steakhouses use. But the difference in tenderness is modest, and you still get the dry-aged flavor.

Chances are, your steak will be cooked just right, too. Of the three cuts I sampled, two -- a filet ordered medium rare and a rib-eye ordered rare -- were right on the money. In fact, the two-inch thick filet was one of the best I've had.

A porterhouse didn't fare as well. Ordered rare, the steak arrived somewhere between medium rare and medium, and burned on the bottom. Fortunately, the staff cheerfully and quickly corrected the lapse by providing a properly cooked steak.

Personally, I can't imagine driving all the way to Chops for anything but one of their dry-aged steaks. For those who prefer to avoid red meat, however, the obligatory seafood, pasta and poultry categories are reasonably well represented by a dozen or so listings, from fried flounder to chicken fettuccine Alfredo to a respectable if not particularly exciting Caribbean grilled mahi-mahi.

Don't skip the appetizers. Chops' tender strips of calamari are lightly breaded and sauteed with tomatoes, banana peppers and capers in a garlicky white wine sauce. Escargots in pastry are rewarding, too. So is oysters Rockefeller, though the presentation -- half a dozen huge oysters baked under a thick blanket of finely chopped, minimally seasoned spinach -- is the most rustic I've seen.

Local businessman Roger Van Praet opened Chops because he got tired of driving to Raleigh for a meal to his liking. I'm betting plenty of steak fans in Raleigh won't mind driving in the other direction.

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