Ruths's Chris's Rants's

How Many Esses Can You Find?

So we went to the new, two-week old Ruth's Chris Steak House last week for Happy Hour in Uptown Dallas.  I have never really been a huge fan of the Ruth's Chris concept.  They do something weird to their steaks after they grill them, like soak them in melted butter and then toss 'em into some kind of molten inferno that heats up to 1600 degrees.  The servers come out wearing oven mitts and haz-mat suits and when they set your plate down, hot, sizzling butter spurts onto the front of the new shirt you just bought last weekend at Nordstrom Rack. Apparently, I am the only person in the world who finds collateral clothes-ruining unpleasant, because there is at least one Ruth's Chris for every four Starbucks in America.  I like Starbucks better though: they don't butter my coffee or stain my clothes unless I spill it on myself, (which has happened more than once) and I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a non-accredited journalist to blame Starbucks for my chronic clumsiness.

And here's another thing that bugs me. Why is it called Ruth's Chris Steak House?  I've never heard of a steak called Chris, though I once knew of a cow named Bernice. There is some kind of urban legend about a woman named Ruth who spent all her money buying a place called Chris Steak House and she couldn't afford to change the sign so she just slapped a "Ruth's" on top.  But I am not buying that because most steak houses are named after family last names like Smith & Wollensky's or Gallagher's or Morton's.  And those all have apostrophes to indicate they belong to said family.  So if the story were true it would have been Ruth's Chris's Steak House, which, besides being unattractive is really hard to say (especially if one lisps).

And while we are on the subject, most people call it Ruth Chris anyway, leaving out all ownership and possessive indicators entirely.  What is it with people and their consarned insistence to omit or insert random esses in place names?  If  a certain martini bar in Puerto Vallarta is called Garbo, for instance, why do people refer to it as Garbo's?  A guy named German owns it (which is funny since he's Mexican, although come to think of it I know a Mexican named Erica, which sounds kind of German or Norwegian or something.)  It's not like Greta Garbo opened the place and then sold it to German before she died.  If that were the case it would be perfectly acceptable to call it Garbo's, but probably more accurate to call it German's Garbo, which brings us back to the same random silliness as Ruth's Chris. (Yet I am much more likely to believe there was a martini called Greta than a steak called Chris.)

Oh yeah, happy hour was fun--everything on the "Ruth's at the Bar TM" is $8 including pomegranate martinis and a half-pound prime hamburger. I badly chose the steak sandwich, which was kind of tough and dry and consisted mostly of gristly butchered end pieces. Perhaps it needed butter.