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Everyone's going low, but Ruth's Chris is the worst fucking restaurant experience I've ever had. And I've been a couple of times, once with family and once because we were given a gift card. Shit apps, shit sides and an acceptable steak for way more money than it should be. The wait staff was creepily servile, like the "how may I pleasure you" that Chick Fil A used to force. And the lights were a cool 5K color temp like I was eating dinner in the parking garage. Fucking garbage.
We have a restaurant like that in our city called 529 Wellington.
It's supposed to be a incredibly upscale chef run steakhouse.
While the old building and decor is wonderful, the dining experience is a complete farce.
The first thing they do is parade in front of you, several gigantic trays of raw meat, dripping with myoglobin. They want to sell you on how wonderful their meat is. I'm already here fuckface, get that fucking raw meat, which smells like raw meat, away from my table and my date. It's an implicit understanding that if you are charging me $60 for a steak, it's going to be the best mother fucking aged steak around, within reason of course.
I was looking at this tray of meat and noticing that there was no marbling in any of the cuts. We were already there and we were already going through the whole rigmarole... But I was braced for a bad steak.
Then, each dish is served separately, so now I'm expected to pay $24 for mashed potatoes and butter. Two heaping tablespoons of mashed potatoes, 2 fronds of dried chives on top. No other flavors except salt. $24. Don't put a scratch of nutmeg or garlic in there or anything just fucking boring potatoes with butter.
Of course, the steak arrives, and it's predictably like a gym mat. Dense, dry, flavorless as a result. I did not even want to finish eating it.
My date and I did not even order drinks, and we barely scrambled out of there for $200. I think in today's money it would be a $400 meal.
For dog shit.
Now I just go and get a really fatty marbled ribeye steak in the discount bin, for like eight bucks, and it's a hundred times better. Those pretentious steakhouses can go to hell, they are almost uniformly rotten in my experience.
Ha! Gym mat! I can feel the toughness and taste the salt; that is a grim picture you paint.
My wife and I never really went to steakhouses that often, but now that we can cook a better steak than anyone else, it's once in a blue moon that we go out for one. Marcel in Atlanta is the only place we go for steak and it's an incredible experience. I just want to put that out there so that people know it can be done right, just rarely is.
I've actually never been to a "good" steakhouse. I've been to many steakhouses, mind you.
I hear people gushing about all kinds of great steaks they've had at various restaurants. I just sit there nonplussed and silent. I believe the average person doesn't know good meat from the hole in their ass.
Edit. I think one of the big things was that I had no shortage of steak growing up. In some weird bipolar way, we did not have a lot of food and we did not have good food, but my father was obsessed with the idea that he was a big success and that meant steak on Sundays.
Our family could not afford the steak, and instead of doing it right, my cheap father would always cook 2 steaks for 5 people which we would then have to fight over.
And even though he was a terrible cook, and most of the stakes were done wrong, I learned by having to go back to the barbecue with my steaks over and again, how to cook them.
So I think I'm just completely bored with the idea that just going and getting a steak is a magic thing.... like you can just go get one at the store