What On Earth Does 'Ruth's Chris Steakhouse' Even Mean?
In 1965, a divorced mother raising two children on her own saw an advertisement for a business that was up for sale in New Orleans. Ruth Fertel mortgaged her house to buy Chris Steak House for $22,000 from its owner, Chris Matulich. Matulich had run the restaurant, located near the New Orleans Fair Grounds Race Course on the border of the Bayou St. John and Treme neighborhoods, since the 1920s.
In mere months, the business began to take off under Fertel's ownership. Then, in 1976, a devastating fire at the restaurant meant having to move locations. A stipulation in the purchase agreement only allowed Fertel to keep the name Chris Steak House if she stayed in the original building, so she had to come up with a new name quickly. She chose her first name, giving her thriving business the clunky moniker Ruth's Chris Steak House. Even with the odd name, Fertel's restaurant soared. Today, there are more than 150 locations in the United States and abroad. The steakhouse chain is also ranked quite high, with an average customer rating of 4.2 on Google and a devoted following.
Ruth Fertel didn't like the name of her own restaurant
While the name doesn't roll off the tongue, under Ruth Fertel, the business flourished and began expanding with the unusual name popping up nationally and then internationally in new location after new location. But the name just sounded weird. The New York Times once described it as "cumbersome," and a critic proclaimed the chain's name spoken three times fast could be used as a sobriety test.
Even Fertel had doubts about her restaurant's name. "I've always hated the name," she told Fortune magazine in 1998. "But we've always managed to work around it." Among Fertel's innovations were the broiler she invented that's able to reach 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to quickly cook steaks, her hiring of mainly single mothers to staff her original restaurant at a time when it wasn't commonly done, and her insistence on finishing off steaks with a fat pat of butter. Another of Ruth's Chris Steak House's secrets is serving the steak on hot plates to keep the meat at the optimum temperature so you can hear it sizzle when it arrives at your table.
Ruth's Chris Steak House lives on
Ruth Fertel died in 2002 at age 75 from lung cancer, but her restaurant empire and its unusual name lived on. In 2023, Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden, among other chains, bought Ruth's Chris for $715 million. They kept the name. Ruth's Chris isn't the only well-known restaurant named after the original owner that is now in someone else's hands. It's much more common than you'd think. For instance, Fleming's, another steakhouse brand named after one of its founders, Paul Fleming, is owned by Bloomin' Brands, the company behind Outback Steakhouse.
But Ruth's Chris is a unique case since the name is so unwieldy. It's even become a bit of an internet joke. In September 2022, the satirical website Clickhole had a fake expletive-laden rant on X, formerly Twitter, from the steakhouse in which the brand went off on customers making fun of its name and threatened to make its moniker even worse. "How about if our name was Ruth is Chris Steakhouse?" the fake Ruth's Chris' X account wrote. "Or Chris is Ruth is Steak is House?" On Reddit the following year, one commenter quipped, "In a few years it will be McDonald's Presents Kellogg's Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, by Circuit City." Until that happens, perhaps for tradition's sake, this restaurant chain should be called Darden's Ruth's Chris Steak House. Talk about a sobriety test.