Steakhouses never went away in the United States, but recently they’ve taken over the dining landscape. Now, everything is steakhouse.
The continued cultural cachet of martinis, olives, and shrimp cocktail: steakhouse. The prevalence of tableside carts that turn all kinds of dishes into dinner and a show: steakhouse. The rise of the “swankstaurant”: steakhouse, just made more exclusive. Brooklyn dive bars offering $20 steak frites: steakhouse-ish. The splashy new restaurants from José Andrés, Kwame Onwuachi, and Daniel Boulud: steakhouse, steakhouse, and steakhouse. Molly Baz’s Thanksgiving spread: steakhouse. Even Cake Zine’s next issue is “Steak Zine.”
This year, the steakhouse continued to expand beyond its traditional lens, the category previously defined by establishments like Musso & Frank Grill in Los Angeles and Keens in New York City. “Can [the steakhouse] evolve?” the New York Times’ Ligaya Mishan asked in September, pointing to openings with international influence, like the Korean Gui, with its prime rib crusted with shio kombu, and the Mexican Cuerno, where $38 steak tacos are prepared tableside. Across the country, as once-undersung cuisines reach new echelons of cultural interest, chefs have looked to the steakhouse as a way of presenting their foods in more luxe fashion: the rise of the bougie Korean barbecue spot Cote in NYC, Miami, and Vegas; the new, glamorous Thai barbecue Unglo in NYC.
Not all of these renditions aim to be so highbrow: In Philadelphia, Chance Anies’s new Manong is a Filipino American steakhouse that’s inspired by Outback and LongHorn. With his first restaurant, Tabachoy, Anies felt like he had to present a more general overview of Filipino food; Manong, however, feels more personal. For Anies, whose mom worked for chain restaurants, going to those places as a child felt like “luxury,” he says, “like hospitality existed in a new light.” Because the concept of the steakhouse is so popular, it provides an opportunity for chefs to work in less familiar ingredients and flavors while maintaining a broader appeal. At Manong, the prime rib comes with an adobo-esque soy sauce- and peppercorn-infused jus, and the burger has a swipe of mayo into which bangus, oil-preserved milkfish from the Philippines, has been mixed in.
Beef is everywhere again, from fancy steakhouses to fast-casual chains.
The 2010s and early 2020s were marked by an increased interest in less meat-focused diets, as pressure mounted on food producers and consumers alike to adopt more sustainable, ethical practices. “Plant-based” dining captured the zeitgeist, and even major recipe sites like Epicurious promised to cut down on beef. A 2022 McKinsey study found a growing trend of consumers eating less or no red meat and embracing flexitarianism, and concluded that more people were open to trying plant-based alternatives.
But a sudden shift has marked the last couple of years, and it feels like a distinct disavowal of all that. Many vegan and vegetarian restaurants have recently shuttered or changed strategies to serve more animal products. The tide has turned away from tech-founded meat substitutes and back toward “animal-based” diets; once-hot plant-burger company Beyond Meat’s stock value plummeted (before reemerging, unsustainably, as a meme stock). The unapologetic embrace of beef and its byproducts like tallow became a prominent part of the conservative culture war. If the pandemic era led to guilt-spurred “conscious eating” that was suspicious of meat, the Make America Healthy Again era has inspired a mindset that sees no reason to feel guilty. “I think ultimately people’s regressive emotions and wanting to latch on to familiarity in the pandemic [led to this return],” vegan chef Shane Stanbridge recently told Eater SF. Stanbridge attributed it, too, to a kind of “revenge eating” of “what they may have deprived themselves throughout the last five years.” Beef is everywhere again, from fancy steakhouses to fast-casual chains, and that’s despite record-high prices over the course of this year.
Even restaurants that feel diametrically opposed to the conventional steakhouse have, however implausibly, embraced the steakhouse as a concept. For the second winter in a row, Los Angeles’s Kismet — bright, airy, colorful, crunchy, vegetable-heavy — is becoming Kismet Steakhouse: Through February, it will once again don white tablecloths, swap out contemporary flower arrangements for red roses, and replace dishes like “stone fruit with lemon balm and turmeric-whey vinaigrette” with New York strip steak, creamed spinach, and French onion dip.
The restaurant’s website maintains that it’s “…still a vegetable loving restaurant,” but co-owner Sara Kramer says that its alter ego as a steakhouse allows it to attract a broader audience. “It’s easy to see the word ‘steakhouse’ and be like, That’s not the restaurant I know and love,” she says. Noting that much of the steakhouse menu is vegetarian, including a center-cut cabbage “steak,” she adds, “We would never abandon our core audience, and we hope that this provides an opportunity for [vegetarians] to try a restaurant concept that normally isn’t geared to them, but also still is very much geared to the people who want a more classic option as well. We’re really trying to please everybody.”
Similarly, Cafe Mado, a Brooklyn restaurant known for its seasonality and foraged vegetables, began running “Steak Mondays” in May, offering $80-per-person, steak-centric prix fixe menus one night a week. The choice to stay open on Mondays — and the necessity, therefore, to make Mondays special — was strategic, according to general manager Rylan Price: Many restaurants in the area are closed, so the restaurant saw Steak Mondays as a way to get not only neighborhood folk but also industry people, who more typically have the day off, in the door.
“We wanted to essentially throw a steak night party at the end of [their] week,” Price says. For $80, each diner gets a cold appetizer, steak, and various sides, including a potato, a vegetable, and a bread; plus dessert. “We want it to really feel like you’re really getting a bang for your buck,” says Price, adding that the format offers the comfortable feeling of a tasting-menu experience at a more approachable price. Mondays, once “an absolute graveyard,” are now steady business with higher check averages and a celebratory ambience. “It’s everyone on my team’s favorite night of the week,” Price says.
The eternal appeal of the steakhouse is, yes, the pomp and circumstance of its retro-formal elegance, but also the reassurance of knowing what we’re getting, as Steak House author Eric Wareheim told me earlier this year. It’s a category with practically codified trappings — red banquettes, dark wood, white tablecloths, frosty martinis — and therefore clear expectations. The steakhouse, like the neighborhood chicken spot, allows us to feel like we’re not taking a risk with our money. Even in a city like NYC, full of interesting restaurants, sometimes you don’t want “interesting.” “What becomes of dining as the world turns to shit?” wrote Interview’s J Lee earlier this year. “Overwhelmingly, the answer is Hillstone. Hillstone. Hillstone. Hillstone,” referring to the buttoned-up, intentionally predictable chain with fanatical devotees.
The concept allows us to cosplay stature for as long as it takes to put down a porterhouse.
Still, I think attributing the steakhouse’s popularity only to comfort ignores the optics of status, even if it’s just an illusion. It’s impossible to separate the experience of the steakhouse from its cultural image: a timeless place where power lunches and excess reign, where the lure of bygone eras with better economies and less guilt about the state of the planet hangs in the air as pipe smoke once did. The steakhouse is about nostalgia, both real and imagined, and in these politicized times, that draws people on both sides of the aisle.
Even if you don’t have a corporate card and you’re not an exec like Don Draper, it makes you feel powerful to sit in a steakhouse, big knife in one hand and stiff drink in the other, in front of a crimson-centered piece of meat. What is eating another animal, after all, if not the ultimate display of one’s power?
For so many people, power felt elusive this year; the wrong people had too much of it. It’s for this reason, I think, that the steakhouse seemed so compelling. The concept allows us to cosplay stature for as long as it takes to put down a porterhouse. We can be treated like big dogs by a hospitality lifer in a red-and-black coat, in a place that gets name-dropped by Taylor Swift. It’s only when we step back outside that, like Cinderella’s magic dissolving at midnight, we have credit card debt and job insecurity once again.
