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.

No LA in NOLA

One Can Never Be Too Loose on Bourbon Street

I just returned to Dallas from a four day conference in New Orleans.  I personally love The Crescent City, the City That Care Forgot, for its Spanish/French/Whatev architecture,  upside down cemeteries, the Mighty Mississippi and its churning Delta Queens, the charming people with "dese and dose" accents and megawatt smiles, the smell of Bourbon Street on a hot July night, redolent of high-spirited frat boys who've knocked back a few two many hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's...well maybe that last one, not so much.  Ahh, but the world class Creole cuisine really makes my bons temps roulez.

The conference was for an association of venue managers and was positively jam-packed with intense educational classes, helpful workshops, inspiring keynote speeches, crazy trade show antics and extravagant theme parties (use your wry, ironic inside voice when reading that sentence.) Sadly, there was not a lot of free time in the agenda to explore all the new little chef-driven kitchens and hole-in-the-wall dives that make New Orleans so romantically gut-busting. Finally, on Sunday night, I discovered an evening free and quickly
speedfingerwalked through Open Table, only to find to my immense dismay that none of the places I was anxious to try--Root, August, or Maurepas Food, were available.  Heck, I couldn't even get into Stella, which I'd been to before.  My feet were killing me from walking about 400 miles that day so I lazily just went next door to where I was staying at the Hilton Riverside to a convenient little sanitized enclave of bistros and cafes and ended up dining at Ruth's Chris Steak House.

Red-faced, I feel shame for exposing myself like that in a food blog, and fear I might be shunned by the foodie universe in coming weeks.  (Of course there is nothing wrong with Ruth's Chris except the odd possessive in its name.  Many people mispronounce it and call it Ruth Chris's, but it's actually, puzzlingly Ruth's Chris.  I mean, what the heck is a Chris steak? Is there a breed of cattle called Chris?  Did perhaps a woman named Ruth buy a Steak House named Chris and didn't have the money to change the sign out front so just spray painted "Ruth's" across the top? These questions blur my mind but thankfully don't blunt my appetite. But I digress.) 

Perhaps He Fears Toe-Main Poisoning

The restaurant was jammed with fat white people who had apparently traveled to the Big Easy in July for the sheer pleasure of wearing high-waisted shorts and socks with sandals in the hot stickiness of high Summer. There was also a preponderance of canes; canes are not an unusual sight in the French Quarter, although they are usually sported jauntily by fancy dressed men in pimp hats and spats. These canes looked more like supplemental weight supports, like a third leg but denuded of socks and sandals. Even some of the children had them.

My server was precious. Actually, her name was Precious, or at least that's what her name tag said, and it was entirely appropriate. She talked me into a drink against my will, forcing me to add "easily influenced" to my resume just below "chain restaurant-goer." She told me she had just put a "loaf" in the oven for me and was going to fetch some whipped butter. I looked the other way as I spread it on a slice of crusty, fragrant bread not once, but twice. (I would have felt worse about it if the couple at the table next to me hadn't eaten two entire loaves each. The woman finished up the last one by dunking the end of it in her butter dish like a cop with a donut in a coffee shop.)

The fresh tomato and red onion salad with balsamic vinaigrette was quite the perfect excuse for eating my weight in blue cheese crumbles.  It was followed by a huge slab of prime New York Strip cooked perfectly medium.  It was on a sizzling hot plate spewing off sparks of smoking butter that made an artistic stain on my white shirt reminiscent of Van Gogh's work during his 1888 sojourn to Arles.  I had eaten about half of it when the snap at the waistband of my pants went berserk and flew right into Precious's eye, blinding her for life. She cursed loudly in some swampland patois and I was afraid she was going to summon a spell from Marie Leveaux or else open up a can of Cajun whupass on me.

It was definitely time to go.  I gathered my sagging pants in my left hand and tried to hide the impressionistic butter painting on my shirt with my right as I hastily scrawled my signature on the credit card slip.  I lost my balance on the way out and struck my head on a lamp post.  As I staggered away I could feel disapproving, squinty eyes on the back of my head from all the tourists still inside.

"Some people just don't know any better," they were thinking as they finished up their chocolate bread pudding with bourbon pecan sauce topped with non-dairy whipped cream.