The Moral Dilemmas of Loving Steakhouses

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I recently had a longer-than-usual conversation with an old friend whom I keep running into at steakhouses. After brushes at Musso & Frank Grill (twice), Smoke House, and Little Dom’s (a spiritually steakhouse-adjacent Italian restaurant), a pattern became apparent: We both like restaurants with rib-eye, icy martinis, and red leather booths.

“Why are you always out at steakhouses, dressed like Sharon Stone in Casino?” he asked.

It’s a good question. Why do I, an analytical, alternative-leaning writer who listens to experimental ambient music and buys organic lettuces at the farmers market every weekend, feel drawn to a setting that unapologetically celebrates power, masculinity, and excess? Why do I want to occasionally make-believe that I’m a millionaire in 1957 (read: a white man with a generous expense account) sinking his teeth into a bloody rib-eye, lit Kent in hand, even if that fantasy isn’t exactly designed for me?

I really do love steak and potatoes, cold vodka, and an excuse to dress up, but that’s not the only answer. In truth, like many people, I’m craving something less tangible. Mired in homesickness for loosely defined “times that felt simpler” as I struggle to keep my morale afloat in a sea of endless doomsday notifications, I find a relief in the escapism of steakhouses and the familiarity of olives on a toothpick, a shrimp cocktail, and a room that could plausibly exist in 1940 or 1980 — somehow able to compartmentalize the experience from its evocation of icky, flagrant displays of wealth and old-timey boys-will-be-boys culture. Still, I can’t help but feel concerned that steakhouses, in all of their glorification of beef and money and nostalgia, have an air of “make America great again” energy.

I grew up in restaurant booths, surrounded by red meat. My grandfather operated a hofbrau; my father, an Italian restaurant. Even now, cavernous, mahogany-paneled, noisy rooms make me feel like a child in a sticky red leather booth, sitting patiently as large men talked business over me and I watched trays of meat in jus and scalloped potatoes whoosh back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. When I was in sixth grade, I once ate two entire racks of lamb in one sitting, and my parents nicknamed me “Carnivore.”

But coming of age really does change us sometimes. When I was 16 and moody and newly obsessed with punk rock and its philosophies, I became a vegetarian, motivated by a deep discomfort with animal suffering and a growing awareness of how power operates between humans and animals, men and women, institutions and individuals. I was influenced by writers like Carol J. Adams, whose work connected meat consumption to broader systems of domination. For years, I didn’t just avoid meat; I felt actively opposed to what it represented.

My views didn’t feel fringe at the time; plant-based eating was on the rise, and there was a sense — maybe naive, but tangible — that the future would be greener, kinder, and more equitable. In the early 2010s, I worked at a vegan magazine for several years, where we ran multiple stories a week about major meat producers committing to more humane practices, of tech companies developing plant-based steak in labs. The rights of animals, of women, and of other marginalized groups seemed to be steadily and reliably improving. I saw no need for idealizing the past.

That sense of inevitability has, to put it mildly, eroded. I started eating meat again in 2013 (you only live once, I figured), and a few years later, for reasons that I assume you’re already exhausted by, the mood of America changed. The iconic Bay Area vegan restaurant I revered during my peak millennial-optimism era is closing this month after 31 years of business. Beyond Meat’s stock price is in the pennies. Regressive views have reproliferated, and the idea that progress would move in a straight line now feels almost quaint.

Steakhouses are built for deals, company cards, and people who are, at best, selectively thinking about factory farms — people who want to feel important (or at least adjacent to someone important). If they were truly for everyone, how could they make you feel like a big shot? With their $68 entrees, $22 martinis, and tableside theatrics, they’ve become symbols of a kind of spending power that fewer and fewer people actually have, and of a past that was exclusionary, inequitable, and, for some, outright hostile.

Even if it wasn’t socially irresponsible to try to revert American society to the way it was many decades ago (make America great again for whom?), it’s financially impossible. America’s economy has seen a dramatic stratification of wealth, with a hollowed-out middle class, stagnated wages, and rampant post-COVID inflation — and no amount of making everyone recite the Pledge of Allegiance four times a day or whatever is going to fix that anytime soon.

Despite all this, I still feel drawn to a night out at a steakhouse. Not just because I like the food, although I (usually) do. Not just because I enjoy the aesthetics, although, let’s be honest, I really do. (Yes, I do like dressing like Sharon Stone in Casino.) It’s because, increasingly, the experience offers something harder to come by: the illusion of control. My own sense of political powerlessness has made me crave a setting where I’m escorted to my table and get my martini just the way I like it. For the span of an unhurried meal, the world narrows to a series of small, satisfying decisions.

Of course, the fantasy only works if you don’t look at it too directly — and after a dirty martini and a leisurely, lively table conversation, I’m not really looking at anything too directly. There’s a certain pleasure in the tension of guilt: of knowing something’s bad for you and choosing to do it anyway, whether that’s eating red meat or indulging nostalgia. Knowing that the steakhouse is a caricature of indulgent power-dining and still finding it fun, and even comforting, may be twisted, but it’s certainly not the only pleasure that’s complicated.

Cigarettes are back. Haven’t you heard? I don’t think it’s a coincidence. You won’t find me in a booth with a Kent (although ask me again if they re-legalize smoking indoors), but at least I can cut into some medium-rare filet mignon and embody a liminal, fleeting alternate reality for a few hours. That is, until the bill comes.

High Steaks, a deep dive into steakhouse culture, continues across Eater all this week.