TOYOTA CONNECTIONS MAGAZINE

 

PRIME DINING

The hottest new steakhouse in Atlanta doesn’t look much like a steakhouse. True, the dining room at Kevin Rathbun Steak is furnished with leather chairs, but not cushy club chairs; they’re sleek, modern Italian jobs with chrome legs. Instead of dark wood paneling, the walls are industrial-style exposed brick hung with splashy modern artwork. There is some wood around the place, but it is rough-hewn and artisanal, like the edgy, sculptural cornice around the kitchen window, made of stacked black walnut boards that evoke a pile of planks at a construction site. Overhead, forget the chandeliers and Tiffany-style fixtures; illumination is supplied by a fanciful construct of aluminum tubing fashioned to look like lighted tree branches.

Visually, this is a far cry from the traditional “gentleman’s club” style of steakhouse, which seems to be exactly what executive chef/owner Kevin Rathbun had in mind when he opened last May. “I call the décor ‘modern lodge,’” says Rathbun, who also owns Rathbun’s and Krog Bar in Atlanta. “I wanted it to feel like you were in the middle of Aspen, but not country style; more like a New York City–style lodge, with some fl air. We put a lot of emphasis on the beauty of the place.”

While traditional steakhouses such as Ruth’s Chris, Morton’s and The Palm continue to thrive on America’s passion for porterhouse, a new kind of steakhouse is carving out a presence in urban locales around the South. Many of these cow palaces have taken steps to broaden their appeal beyond their usual customers, reaching out to women as well as men, and to lighter eaters as well as confirmed carnivores. Menus have gone aggressively upscale, with expensive ingredients and complex preparations that used to be the domain of white-tablecloth restaurants. And the traditional steakhouse interior-design formula of leather-covered booths and dark wood paneling, while still popular, is no longer compulsory.

Take Prime One Twelve in Miami’s South Beach, which is located in the historic Browns Hotel but exudes an up-to-the-minute urban cool. Calling itself “a modern steakhouse,” Prime One Twelve is unabashedly in touch with its feminine side, decorated in a chic, contemporary style with flattering lighting, and featuring piped-in music by sexy crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.

“When we opened in 2004, women were intimidated to go into traditional steakhouses, which looked like men’s clubs,” says owner Myles Chefetz. “We made [Prime One Twelve] more women-friendly, and we get big tables of women dining here.” Which, it turns out, is quite all right with the male patrons.

The evolution of the new urban steakhouse goes way beyond interior design; what’s on the plate is different, too. Innovators like Chefetz and Rathbun, and a veritable stampede of celebrity chefs, have raised the bar on high-end steakhouse menus. It used to be enough to offer a shrimp cocktail for starters, followed by a big hunk of meat, an oversized baked potato and a side of creamed spinach. Shrimp cocktail hasn’t lost its popularity; at Prime One Twelve you can order a jumbo—at $8 per shrimp. But that’s just one of more than a dozen appetizers, including Maine lobster cocktail, jumbo lump crab cakes, pan-seared diver scallops, fresh oysters on the half shell and yellowfin tuna tartare, not to mention indulgences such as caviar and fresh foie gras. Or how about a festive starter, like four-cheese fondue for the table, or an order of four Kobe beef sliders? In short, this is a spot where you can do some serious eating (and spending) long before you pick up a steak knife.

At new-style steakhouses, the strips, filets, ribeyes and porterhouses face some tough competition from other menu items. The non-beef main-course temptations at Kevin Rathbun Steak include diver scallop Rockefeller with crispy bacon, Scottish salmon with candied pecan butter, and a Berkshire pork tenderloin with Argentine chimichurri sauce and sautéed spinach. And at Birmingham, Alabama’s newest steak restaurant, Plaza III, which replaced the Copper Grill in August, Maine lobsters weighing four pounds and up account for 10 percent of the business, according to executive chef and general manager Tom Minchella. The tank of live lobsters at the entrance helps create crustacean cravings, explains Minchella, but a lot of customers come in looking for fresh seafood as an alternative to beef. “We also do a fresh Gulf grouper that’s become very, very popular,” he adds.

There’s a shakeup next to the plate as well. The steakhouse “side,” long viewed in the food-service industry as merely a cash cow, is moving front and center, with fresh emphasis on innovation and luxury ingredients. Prime One Twelve’s most popular side dish is truffled mac and cheese, the traditional comfort food taken up a notch with imported fromage and a lashing of expensive white truffle oil. In Charleston, South Carolina, the 5-year-old steakhouse Grill 225 serves several sides with a Southern accent, such as fried green tomatoes with creole crawfish rémoulade. “We’re a distinctively Southern steakhouse,” notes owner Nick Palassis. “But we wanted to get away from the norm and do things with a twist.” So the mashed sweet potatoes are laced with creamy Boursin cheese, and the beets are layered with melted Roquefort.

With all this change, do you think the meat has been left alone? Not quite. Upscale steakhouse operators are placing new emphasis on the quality and sourcing of their beef. Many restaurants serve only USDA prime beef, the top grade available. Specially aged steaks, as well as those from specialty breeds such as Wagyu (also known as Kobe-style after the celebrated cattle-producing region in Japan)—formerly the exclusive domain of a few select purveyors—are now available in top steakhouses around the South. “We try to offer a lot of exotic steaks you won’t see [elsewhere],” says Palassis of Grill 225, which serves only prime steaks and ages them an average of 42 days. “Most steakhouses age their meat 21 to 24 days,” he says. “We get better flavor and more tenderness.”

When it’s available, Grill 225 offers a longbone Kobe ribeye for $125 that Palassis says is “very popular.” The restaurant’s top seller is a $54 centercut New York strip weighing about 18 ounces that has been aged a long, leisurely 50 days.

Indeed, there appears to be little price sensitivity when it comes to top-quality steak. “Prime beef makes up only 2 percent of all beef produced,” explains Rick Cheesman, general manager of Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House, a $10 million, 16,000-square-foot, three-level eatery in Charlotte that opened last spring. “When you step up to prime, it’s a small chunk of the market, and you can understand quite quickly why it costs so much money. Our customers are very well educated as to what a great prime steak should cost, and what it should taste like.”

At Plaza III, Minchella serves exclusively prime beef and says that he sees no letup in the demand for the big, impressive steak that has long been a steakhouse signature. One of his top sellers is a prime longbone ribeye he likes to call (with all due respect to Atlanta Braves fans) a “Tomahawk chop,” after its distinctive 8- to 10-inch bone. “It’s hard to get,” says Minchella of the burly specimen that weighs 28 to 32 ounces and sells for $65. “We order a couple of hundred of them every few months. We have a list of people that we call when they come in. They go like hotcakes.”

What possible accoutrement does one add to a steak costing $50, $75 or $125? Back away from that bottle of A.1. The latest steakhouse trend is to offer an array of house-made sauces and compound butters, from horseradish cream and béarnaise to butter with Gorgonzola cheese or black truffles. Before you start hitting the sauce, keep in mind that each serving has a price tag, typically $1.25 (for peppercorn sauce, at Kevin Rathbun’s) to $3 (foie gras butter, at Prime One Twelve). And no, this is not the time to start beefing about prices.

Claim Your Steak
Here’s where you can do just that: five restaurants, five cities, five states.

Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steak House
4725 Piedmont Row Drive, Charlotte, NC
704-552-5502; delfriscos.com/charlotte

Grill 225
225 E. Bay Street, Charleston, SC
843-266-4222; grill225.com

Kevin Rathbun Steak
154 Krog Street, Suite 200, Atlanta, GA
404-524-5600; kevinrathbunsteak.com

Plaza III Steakhouse
595 Brookwood Village, Birmingham, AL
205-414-1411; plazaiiisteakhouse.com/birmingham

Prime One Twelve
112 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL
305-532-8112; prime112.com