By and large, most diners at Cote, the sleek and club-like New York City steakhouse, order the Butcher’s Feast. For $82 per person, diners get four cuts of beef, grilled tableside. But there is no creamed spinach here, nor loaded baked potatoes: Instead, there is banchan, like kimchi and pickled daikon; scallion salad, with gochugaru vinaigrette; lettuce leaves, with a side of ssamjang; gyeran-jjim, renamed on the menu as “savory egg souffle”; and bubbling clay pots of both kimchi stew and doenjang stew, served with rice.
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Many customers, specifically non-Korean ones, don’t know what the stews are, explains owner Simon Kim, but the meat makes them more amenable, putting them in “the vibe,” according to Kim. “It’s an experience that some of the meat-and-potato guys wouldn’t have taken otherwise, and they’re open to it,” he says. “They came for the steak, and they stay for the kimchi.”
Cote is, Kim emphasizes, not the typical Korean barbecue restaurant, but a Korean steakhouse. This distinction mattered to him, like the difference between a bistro and brasserie. He wanted fun and fire, but also 1,200 labels of wine, dry-aged wagyu, and caviar — to merge the energy of the Korean barbecue restaurant with the well-established luxury of the American steakhouse.
Before Cote opened in 2017, Kim received warnings about his concept. With millennials eating much less red meat than older generations, the steakhouse was on the decline, advisers said. Recent years have proven this false, however. Not only has the steakhouse surged in a wave of nostalgic dining, overcoming even spiking beef prices, but Cote has succeeded, still impossible to book nearly a decade in and now with swanky outposts in Miami, Singapore, and Las Vegas.
The revival of the classic American steakhouse symbolizes a specific cultural moment, but the rise of the new American steakhouse — as evidenced by restaurants like Cote, NYC’s Cuerno, San Diego’s Animae, and Las Vegas’s Maroon — might symbolize a more interesting one.
In our current dining culture, the steakhouse represents dueling sensibilities. Here, of course, is the presiding take: The steakhouse is a symbol of the current shift toward conservatism. The right has long stoked the image of its opponents as soft, timid soy-s, themselves as the macho party of meat and potatoes; the steakhouse is their stronghold, its standardized menu asserting a particular Americana. The steakhouse is risk-averse and resistant to new ideas, satisfied enough in its own timeless format.
The steakhouse is, Jessica Sidman wrote in 2024, “tradition and masculinity… It’s America First (never mind if the cooks and valets are immigrants).” It’s for reasons like these, argued Alicia Kennedy, that the current steakhouse revival cannot be politically neutral: It is a “collective fever dream in which the right-wing, masculinist approach of the carnivores has found a palatable way into polite society.”
But perhaps the steakhouse can instead assert another America: the one built by immigrants and enslaved people, for whom status and power have been hard-won. If the steakhouse protects a certain vision of Americanness through the standardization of its menu and the trappings of tradition, is it possible for the steakhouse, in slightly different form, to also subvert these standards? This rising wave of steakhouses suggests so.
Sneakily, the steakhouse has emerged as a kind of Trojan horse: a venue in which globalization is championed, where foreign flavors are rendered more familiar, the borders between cuisines become more permeable, and immigrant chefs elevate their cultures to new levels of prestige.
Since 2021, Tara Monsod has been the executive chef at Animae, a glitzy, velvet-draped Asian American steakhouse in San Diego. Amid the city’s more traditional establishments like Ruth’s Chris and Morton’s, Animae stands out, pairing its dry-aged rib-eyes with banchan and painting its pork tomahawk with a glistening, sweet beet glaze in the style of Filipino tocino. “It’s presented simply like a steak — but not a steak, and still very much Filipino, but with the visual appeal of a steakhouse,” Monsod says. One doesn’t have to understand tocino to try it; in the milieu of the steakhouse, meat is a universal language. “At the end of the day, it’s a slab of meat that they can’t resist.”
Look past the big meats, and Monsod’s subversion of the steakhouse makes itself more clear. Onto Animae’s menu she sneaks chicken cooked into adobong pula, reddened with annatto oil, and pancit palabok, luxed-up with lobster, trout roe, and bucatini. In other dishes, what she’s doing is more “bridging the gap.” Take her potatoes, crisped in beef fat then served with a smear of koji-spiked sour cream and dollops of Chinese sausage jam, evoking a baked potato. Initially, Monsod resisted potatoes. “It’s an Asian restaurant,” she says. “But people associate potatoes with steakhouse, so I gave in.”
That push and pull exists on both sides of the proposition. The power of the steakhouse is that, for many people, it’s “unintimidating,” conjuring comforting expectations of Caesar salads and creamed spinach. This is important in a city like San Diego, where the culinary scene is still “growing,” Monsod says. This is also its opportunity: She can hook diners in with a keyword, promising something familiar, then sneak in something unexpected. Her Caesar salad, for example, is layered with nori flakes and crispy baby anchovies. “You catch them with the very American side,” she says.
Later this month, chef Kwame Onwuachi will open Maroon, a Caribbean steakhouse in Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. It offers a telling of history one might not expect to see from a steakhouse, which most might associate with a somewhat sanitized nostalgia of the United States’s past. Onwuachi’s restaurant gets its name from Maroons, the escaped and freed slaves who went on to create their own communities in Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Through the restaurant, Onwuachi says, “I’m able to tell the story of the Maroons and that story of survival.”
Onwuachi writes of 17th-century Jamaica in his 2019 memoir; it’s cited on Maroon’s website, explaining the restaurant’s backstory. When Britain captured the colony from Spain, some Spaniards freed or left behind their slaves. These Maroons, he writes, hid out in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, where they lived a “hardscrabble existence” of subsistence farming and the occasional raid on the British occupiers. “In order to not reveal their location, they built these jerk pits and then covered them, so the smoke wouldn’t reveal where they were. Through that came the invention of jerk cuisine,” Onwuachi says.
Because of these origins, the scholar Tao Leigh Goffe describes jerk as “a cuisine outside of and in opposition to the European colonial and Creole palate.” And yet, here it is: central to one of the Strip’s most anticipated new openings, beckoning anyone in Vegas looking for a good time. At Maroon, the live-fire jerk pit takes center stage. It’s the restaurant’s heart, from which the 30-day rum-aged steaks, racks of lamb, and chicken — brined, marinated, and smoked in a four-day process — will emerge. While the restaurant will have the requisite steakhouse dishes like steak tartare, “the things that are coming out of the pit are really, really signature,” according to Onwuachi.
In this way, Maroon builds on what Onwauchi has done with his NYC restaurant Tatiana, notably in its claiming of a place of power. Tatiana is located in the complex of Lincoln Center, the construction of which, as Pete Wells wrote in his 2023 review, resulted in the destruction of a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood. It reestablishes a tether to a history that might otherwise be whitewashed. Power is central to Vegas and to the very concept of the steakhouse; the story of Maroon is a reminder that subversion is its own kind of power, too.
Steakhouses promise that anyone dining there deserves the luxury experience. Still, what cuisines have historically won this luxury treatment? For those that are, more commonly, relegated to the “cheap eats” margins, the steakhouse — with its self-assured entitlement to its level of expense — can challenge perceptions.
In his early travels abroad, Mexican restaurateur Alberto Martínez found Mexican culture derided, its food reduced to nachos, tacos, and tamales. For Cuerno, the NYC restaurant he opened in the summer of 2025, Martínez chose the language of Mexican steakhouse over Mexican restaurant precisely because he knew the latter would evoke “tequila, donkeys, burritos, and other things that we are not,” he says.
Cuerno serves steaks crusted in Mexican salt — $188 for a tomahawk — and other dishes that are meant to evoke Northern Mexico’s carne asada culture. Its salad is not Caesar but César de Tijuana, topped with chicharron croutons, in a reminder that despite the dish’s frequent association with Italian restaurants, it really is a Mexican invention. Cuerno is the first U.S. venture from Martínez, who previously ran high-end restaurants across Mexico as part of the Costeño Group.
As a 16-year-old, Martínez opened his first food business in Mexico, a very small taco stand that sold only steak tacos, topped with a bit of bone marrow and salsa verde; everyone in his hometown hired him to cater their parties. Despite the affection for Mexican dishes like tacos and tamales among non-Mexican clientele, there remains an unspoken price ceiling for what certain foods should cost in the U.S. At Cuerno, that dish of humble beginnings has been reenvisioned into a showy signature worthy of a Midtown steakhouse. Order the Taco Taquero, and a server wheels over a cart to chop the inclusions tableside. The mixture then goes into tacos — $42 for three. In the context of the steakhouse, though, people are willing to pay for meat.
The thwack of knife against wood that percusses through the dining room tells the story that Martínez wanted to put forth with Cuerno. “It’s a very special sound that reminds me of the north of Mexico,” he says. “I wanted people to hear that sound and [for it to] become something very familiar.” In NYC, “all the kitchens are powered by Mexicans,” Martínez says. “But very few places really represent us.”
Monsod has found a similar contradiction between the expectations set by the steakhouse, and where people — even within her community — expect to see Filipino food. “People don’t want to pay more for Asian food, or for Filipino food specifically,” she says. Especially among her parents’ generation, “I feel like sometimes there’s this fear or embarrassment that, for whatever reason, our food is not worthy to be in a space like that.”
For these diners, her goal is for Animae to inspire a new pride. An expensive dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows, gold accents, and lush fabrics — where cultural foods otherwise taken for granted are instead presented with tweezered polish — looks like some level of making it, after all. “I think once they experience that,” she says, “They can break down that idea of where our food [is] versus where it can be.”
It’s all a little more complicated than that, though. Getting diners to take interest in “foreign” flavors doesn’t actually shift the culture at large in a more progressive direction. People who vote against immigrants still like tacos, maybe even more so when they’re filled with perfectly charred steak and served in spaces smoothed by the steakhouse’s shimmery opulence. The steakhouse is still predicated upon reinforcing the status quo — just look at the way chefs have to conform to its conventions.
Maybe it’s a naive illusion to believe that the steakhouse can mean anything other than what it has always meant. But can’t it also be the scaffolding for something new, and isn’t it invigorating to see something reworked to be a vehicle toward the opposite perspective? In these steakhouses, the borders between cultures are open; cuisines meld.
Simon Kim describes his Korean steakhouse as embracing “the power of ‘and.’” Cote is a place where the American steakhouse and the Korean barbecue restaurant both realize they can take some cues from the other. It’s a place, Kim is proud to say, where big spenders buying bottles in the thousands share a dining room with NYU students on the rare splurge, both of them sitting down for the same Butcher’s Feast. “Our dining room feels more like a coral reef than a group of sharks,” Kim says.
The steakhouse is the staid, protective nostalgia of the old, and the steakhouse can also be the tradition-pushing promise of the new.
