BonjourParis

In the US the Steaks Are High

Little did I know, growing up in Geneva, that the popular Café de Paris, down the street from the Gare Cornavin, was already an icon. I just knew it smelled great inside, a busy, beefy aroma of thin-sliced entrecôte, bubbling butter sauce, and frites à volonté. Replicated in Paris and renamed l'Entrecôte, the concept became the embodiment of the French steakhouse. For me, it's comfort food. 

Now I'm in Seattle more often than not, where you can get a French steak-frites if you know where to look. But it's much easier easy to find examples of American steakhouses—dimly lit, mahogany-paneled, mafia-chic hideouts for fat cats and their trophy molls—where beef is served in overpriced, blackened chunks that exemplify America's taste for the humongous. You'd think this concept would never fly in classy, laid-back, egalitarian Seattle, but you'd be wrong. 

Yet another high-end steakhouse, from Atlanta's 25-unit chain, has just opened an outpost downtown, steps from chain rivals Ruth's Chris (New Orleans, 92 units) and Morton's (Chicago, 70 stores),  not to mention a couple of locally-owned, downtown standbys, the Met, the Brooklyn and Canlis.  

We were unable to attend a press preview of Cap Grille but did get to a dinner for the media at Morton's earlier in the week. Below street level, speakeasy-like, we could hear the buzz of contented patrons whenever the doors to our private "board room" would open to admit servers bearing victuals and barmen with beverages. Heading the service team, a chipper woman named Jane Lee brought forth six cuts of steak and one living specimen of Maine lobster: a primer on prime, one might say, full of good reasons to pay top dollar for dinner. Average tab at Morton's, by the way, is $95, compared to $60 at the Space Needle (our town's top-grossing restaurant, which serves over 300,000 meals a year), beating out local top ticket Daniel's Broiler ($83, one third of it wine and spirits.) 

The steakhouse business, unlike the product, is tough, especially at the top end, where clubby local institutions, like El Gaucho and The Met in Seattle or the Ringside in Portland, used to dominate the market. Stiff drinks, big steaks and a discreet maitre d' were enough, back then, to draw politicos, celebrities and gawkers.  

It wasn't until the late 1970s that franchised steakhouses caught on nationally, luring expense-account execs with pricey cuts of meet and stratospheric wine lists. (Fleming's, a Florida steakhouse chain with moderately priced wines, didn't survive in Seattle.)  

The Wall Street Journal now has a feature with floor plans of "power tables" at restaurants frequented by business celebrities, a surprising number of them steakhouses. Airline magazines and business journals regularly run "where to eat" suggestions that highlight beef emporiums. The steakhouses themselves advertise "top ten" lists. And periodically, they even get reviewed by local writers, who invariably choke on the high cost of eating in a steakhouse. One lowbrow writer followed up a review of local steakhouses with an admiring review of Sizzler (a Sherman Oaks, Calif., casual-dining chain with 250 units).  

But gee, if Microsoft is ready to spend billions on Yahoo, the steakhouses want some of that local dot-com wealth. So the institutions are changing. Like moles coming out of the ground, they're surveying a landscape of diet-conscious eaters picking at small plates out in the open. And today's high-spending diners, it seems, want to see and be seen. An exec at Morton's acknowledges that the steakhouse-as-mafia-hideout is passé. The waiters may still wear tuxes even as (and even if) the clientele dresses in jeans, but the newest Morton's are all above-ground, with windows.