The history of Ruth's Chris Steak House is as colorful and eccentric as the city where it
was born. There's plenty about this venerable restaurant that even its most loyal customers
probably don't know about. So keep watching to discover the truth about Ruth's Chris Steak House.
Ruth Fertel was a divorced single mother working as a lab technician
at Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans when she became interested
in buying a local restaurant specializing in steaks. Despite having no restaurant experience,
in 1965 she took out a $22,000 mortgage on her house in order to buy Chris Steak House.
Fertel was so inexperienced that when she met with the bank she only asked for the $18,000
to purchase the restaurant. Luckily, the bank made sure that she borrowed a few extra thousand
to cover food and overhead costs. Despite her lack of experience,
her new venture became an immediate success thanks to her determination. In one interview,
she described the type of service that customers could expect, as she noted,
"We went out of our way to please customers. We spoiled them. One of our regular Sunday customers
was operated on for his teeth and couldn't bite into a steak. So I chopped his steak in
the grinder, formed it into the same shape as before, and served it to him. He was thrilled."
"Ruth welcomed everyone, from hardworking folks to elected officials on the take."
When Chris Steak House burned down in 1976, Ruth Fertel quickly scrambled to open it back
up in a new, bigger location. That presented a problem, though, as her original purchase
agreement with the previous owner specified that she could only use the restaurant's name
at the original location. So to work around this dilemma, Fertel simply tacked her own first name
in front of the original moniker, resulting in the unwieldy Ruth's Chris Steak House.
As her son Randy recalled in his memoir The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak,
"She had grown to hate being called Chris, or, worse, being taken for Chris's wife."
The new name's oddness made it both memorable and a bit of a tongue-twister. One restaurant critic
once likened it to a sobriety test, as anyone who could say it correctly
was probably not inebriated. Even though Fertel came up with the name,
she wasn't particularly fond of it. As she told Fortune Magazine in 1998,
"I've always hated the name. But we've always managed to work around it."
"And work around it she did."
On her first day as owner of what would become Ruth's Chris Steak House,
Ruth Fertel sold 35 steaks, charging about $5 for each one. Within six months,
she had raked in more than twice her annual salary at Tulane. As the restaurant's reputation grew,
so did its clientele. After one of its most loyal customers moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge,
he would occasionally return just to get a steak at his favorite restaurant. In 1977,
he talked Fertel into opening a Ruth's Chris franchise in his neck of the woods so that he'd
be able to enjoy her steaks without having to make the long drive. As Fertel once explained,
"When I started franchising, that really got the name out,
and the more the name became known, the busier we became in all our restaurants.
Our name recognition spread. In fact, all our franchisees were people who had eaten at one
time or another in one of our restaurants. We never looked for franchisees. They came to us."
As of 2021, there are more than 150 Ruth's Chris Steak House franchises around the world.
When putting together her staff, Ruth Fertel bucked tradition and hired other single mothers
as her waiters. She and the other ladies came to be known as the "Broads on Broad Street,"
referring to the restaurant's original New Orleans location on North Broad Street.
Fertel knew from her own experience that raising a child on one's own required both
reliability and hard work. So radical was her hiring practice that there was a time
when Ruth's Chris was the city's only upscale eatery to have female servers.
Even after Fertel's passing in 2002, her restaurants have continued to celebrate mothers.
For example, in 2017 Ruth's Chris announced a special Mother's Day menu
and a gift for moms. As Chairman and CEO Michael O'Donnell declared,
"Our founder, Ruth Fertel, was a single mother and famously employed an all-female
wait staff of single mothers at our first location in New Orleans.
We are proud to raise a glass to her and all mothers, past and present, on this
special occasion and provide a small token of our appreciation for their hard work and devotion."
Whenever a steak is served at Ruth's Chris Steak House, it's still sizzling when it arrives at
the table. This dates back to the original Chris Steak House practice of placing the plated steak
under the broiler for a minute or so and then adding a pat of butter and some parsley,
as the butter creates the signature sizzle. It's no mean feat to ensure
that the steaks are still sizzling and popping when they make it to the table.
So Ruth Fertel came up with a solution to ensure that it happens: a custom-made
infrared broiler that cooks the steaks at an enormously high temperature. As Lana Duke,
a franchisee of Ruth’s Chris Restaurants in San Antonio and Toronto, told Dine Magazine in 2020,
"With her chemistry and physics degrees she had this broiler made that cooked steaks at
1800 degrees. The sizzle in the plate kept it hot to the very last bite.
It was difficult to get every Ruth's Chris in the world to do that.
'If it doesn't sizzle, send it back.' That helped build the brand."
With such serious commitment to the sizzle,
it's no wonder that Ruth's Chris has hung around for so long.
Along with those sizzling steaks, another signature dish at Ruth's Chris Steak House
is the creamed spinach. Ruth Fertel never revealed where she obtained the recipe while she was alive,
though her son Randy did tell New Orleans music
magazine Off Beat that the dish was his great-uncle's invention. As he recalled,
"The story of the spinach, it's an old family recipe. In my research,
I went to interview a cousin in Houston, and we were driving along to see another cousin
and I said something about how everybody loves the creamed spinach at Ruth’s Chris,
and she said, 'You know that’s Uncle Martin’s creamed spinach.'"
Randy believed that it would've been a great idea to tell diners that the recipe
was a treasured family recipe, but his mother saw things differently.
He chalked her secretiveness up to her pride. As he explained,
"I think it was all about my mother's ego.
She wasn't going to share the fact that it wasn't her recipe."
"Dang, I thought y'all had steak."
"Oh, we do. On the second page of your menus."
If you haven't been eating at Ruth's Chris for every decade that it's been open,
you might not realize that the restaurant made the switch from dry-aged to wet-aged steaks.
As Randy Fertel revealed in his memoir, his mother did this to maintain more consistency.
Dry-aging presents some disadvantages, like the additional cost of cold storage along with
a certain degree of loss, which results in the meat becoming more expensive in the long run.
Another problem with dry-aged beef was spoilage. As Randy recalled,
"Mom weekly lost a few steaks to such taint when customers turned up their noses."
While Fertel would quickly get the customer a replacement steak, she also believed that
the whole experience gave the restaurant a bad reputation for those customers.
So she decided to switch to wet-aged steaks, which are aged after being vacuum-packed
in plastic and don't go bad. However, while wet-aged beef may deliver more consistency,
it tends not to be as robustly flavored as dry-aged meat.
In 2005, New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and Ruth's Chris Steak House was one of
many businesses affected by the fallout. The flagship location on Broad Street was badly
damaged by the floodwaters, and it never reopened. The chain's corporate offices, which were located
in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, were also flooded, which led to a big change.
Ruth's Chris executives got together for a meeting to figure out their next move,
and they ultimately determined that the situation in New Orleans was simply too tenuous.
Thus, they decided to move the company's corporate headquarters to Orlando,
Florida. As chief executive Craig S. Miller told The New York Times,
"It was probably one of the toughest decisions that I ever had to make:
to tell my people that we are not going back."
One of the most beloved aspects of Ruth's Chris Steak House is its reputation for
promotional offerings, such as giving moms a $25 credit on Mother's Day.
One particularly notable promotion occurred in 2019 at a Ruth's Chris location in Ann Arbor,
Michigan that promised a free steak to anyone with the name Chris,
or a variation such as Christopher or Christina. Specifically, they would receive a
free eight-ounce petite filet. As Paul Hannah, the restaurant's general manager, announced,
"We have loved bringing this excellent steak house legacy to the Ann Arbor community for
over five years, and we’d like to thank the community once again for their continued
support. This summertime promotion is a fun and unique way for us to pay it forward."
Another Ruth's Chris promotion offered a special gift to the class of 2019.
All nine of the restaurant's North Carolina locations honored graduates by offering them
a complimentary three-course dinner from the Seasonal Classics Menu.
The expectation was that graduates would be dining with their families,
as the offer was contingent on the purchase of an additional four adult entrées.
In the spring of 2020, Congress passed a $2 trillion stimulus package to address the economic
impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Included in the package was the Paycheck Protection Program,
a $349 billion fund administered by the Small Business Administration
intended to provide low-interest loans for small businesses with fewer than 500 employees.
Alas, two weeks after its April 3 launch, the PPP had completely run out of money.
It soon became apparent that some not-so-small businesses exploited a loophole, with large
corporations able to collect loans if those companies had fewer than 500 employees in one
of their locations. Ruth's Hospitality Group, corporate parent of Ruth's Chris Steak House,
was one of those companies, as it received two $10-million loans for two of its properties.
Outrage erupted in light of the fact that Ruth's Chris had made
$42 million in profit on $468 million in revenue in 2019. Furthermore,
the company had $86 million on hand in cash reserves. It also didn't help that Ruth's
Chris had furloughed a significant number of employees. Meanwhile, numerous independently
owned restaurants throughout the country were unable to get a dime in loans when the PPP
fund ran out. Eventually, a Change.org petition was launched demanding that the
corporate owners of Ruth's Chris Steak House return their loans. As the petition stated,
"Many small businesses are now being told there is no money left for them,
and they cannot pay their employees, and may have to close forever. This is a travesty,
and a disgusting display of corporate greed during a time of disaster."
Soon after its launch, the petition received more than a quarter-million signatures, and on April
23, 2020, Ruth's Chris Steak House announced that it would return the $20 million in loans.
But it wasn't all bad press for Ruth's Chris during the pandemic, as one location in Granger,
Indiana offered free meals to its laid-off staffers and their families once per day on
weekdays via curbside delivery. Ashley Kyles, one of the laid-off employees, told WNDU News,
"I always knew that I did work for great people and a great establishment,
but unfortunately when hard times happen, they happen, and here we are and they are
standing right by my side letting me know that everything is going to be okay."
"When this whole tragedy hit, the first thing we thought of was,
what is going to happen to our 75 employees?"
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