After its founding in 1965, Ruth's Chris Steak House grew from one New Orleans location to more than 150 restaurants all over the world, thanks to the talent and vision of Ruth Fertel. Fertel, who died in 2002, turned Southern hospitality and sizzling steaks into an empire. Ruth's Chris is typically in the news for announcements of new restaurant openings or a creative menu promotion. But in 2020, the chain saw a massive backlash when it became engulfed in controversy over taking federal loans meant for small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ruth's Chris Steak House's history is as eccentric and exciting as the city where it was born. There's a lot even the chain's biggest fans may not know about it, like where that weird name came from. So here's the truth about Ruth's Chris Steak House.
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00:00The history of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse is as colorful and eccentric as the city where
00:06it was born. There's plenty about this venerable restaurant that even its most loyal customers
00:11probably don't know about. So keep watching to discover the truth about Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.
00:18Ruth Fertel was a divorced single mother working as a lab technician at Tulane School of Medicine
00:24in New Orleans when she became interested in buying a local restaurant specializing
00:29in steaks. Despite having no restaurant experience, in 1965 she took out a $22,000 mortgage on her
00:36house in order to buy Chris Steakhouse. Fertel was so inexperienced that when she met with the bank,
00:42she only asked for the $18,000 to purchase the restaurant. Luckily, the bank made sure
00:49that she borrowed a few extra thousand to cover food and overhead costs. Despite her lack of
00:54experience, her new venture became an immediate success thanks to her determination. In one
01:00interview, she described the type of service that customers could expect, as she noted,
01:04"'We went out of our way to please customers. We spoiled them. One of our regular Sunday customers
01:09was operated on for his teeth and couldn't bite into a steak, so I chopped his steak in the
01:14grinder, formed it into the same shape as before, and served it to him. He was thrilled.'"
01:20Ruth welcomed everyone, from hardworking folks to elected officials on the take.
01:26When Chris Steakhouse burned down in 1976, Ruth Fertel quickly scrambled to open it back up
01:32in a new, bigger location. That presented a problem, though, as her original purchase
01:37agreement with the previous owner specified that she could only use the restaurant's name
01:41at the original location. So to work around this dilemma, Fertel simply tacked her own first name
01:47in front of the original moniker, resulting in the unwieldy Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.
01:52As her son Randy recalled in his memoir, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak,
01:57she had grown to hate being called Chris, or worse, being taken for Chris' wife.
02:02The new name's oddness made it both memorable and a bit of a tongue twister.
02:07One restaurant critic once likened it to a sobriety test, as anyone who could say it
02:11correctly was probably not inebriated. Even though Fertel came up with the name,
02:16she wasn't particularly fond of it. As she told Fortune magazine in 1998,
02:21"...I've always hated the name, but we've always managed to work around it."
02:25And work around it she did.
02:27On her first day as owner of what would become Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, Ruth Fertel sold 35
02:33steaks, charging about $5 for each one. Within six months, she had raked in more than twice her
02:39annual salary at Tulane. As the restaurant's reputation grew, so did its clientele. After
02:45one of its most loyal customers moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, he would occasionally
02:49return just to get a steak at his favorite restaurant. In 1977, he talked Fertel into
02:55opening a Ruth's Chris franchise in his neck of the woods so that he'd be able to enjoy her steaks
03:00without having to make the long drive. As Fertel once explained,
03:04"...when I started franchising, that really got the name out. And the more the name became known,
03:08the busier we became in all our restaurants. Our name recognition spread. In fact,
03:13all our franchisees were people who had eaten at one time or another in one of our restaurants.
03:18We never looked for franchisees. They came to us."
03:22As of 2021, there are more than 150 Ruth's Chris Steakhouse franchises around the world.
03:29When putting together her staff, Ruth Fertel bucked tradition and hired other single mothers
03:34as her waiters. She and the other ladies came to be known as the Broads on Broad Street,
03:40referring to the restaurant's original New Orleans location on North Broad Street.
03:44Fertel knew from her own experience that raising a child on one's own required both reliability
03:50and hard work. So radical was her hiring practice that there was a time when Ruth's Chris was the
03:55city's only upscale eatery to have female servers. Even after Fertel's passing in 2002,
04:00her restaurants have continued to celebrate mothers. For example, in 2017,
04:05Ruth's Chris announced a special Mother's Day menu and a gift for moms.
04:09As chairman and CEO Michael O'Donnell declared,
04:13"...our founder Ruth Fertel was a single mother and famously employed an all-female waitstaff
04:18of single mothers at our first location in New Orleans. We are proud to raise a glass to her
04:23and all mothers, past and present, on this special occasion and provide a small token
04:28of our appreciation for their hard work and devotion."
04:32Whenever a steak is served at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, it's still sizzling when it
04:36arrives at the table. This dates back to the original Chris Steakhouse practice of placing
04:41the plated steak under the broiler for a minute or so and then adding a pat of butter and some
04:46parsley. As the butter creates, the signature sizzle. It's no mean feat to ensure that the
04:51steaks are still sizzling and popping when they make it to the table, so Ruth Fertel came up with
04:56a solution to ensure that it happens — a custom-made infrared broiler that cooks the steaks
05:01at an enormously high temperature. As Lana Duke, a franchisee of Ruth's Chris restaurants in San
05:07Antonio and Toronto, told Dine magazine in 2020,
05:11"...with her chemistry and physics degrees, she had this broiler made that cooked steaks
05:16at 1,800 degrees. The sizzle in the plate kept it hot to the very last bite. It was difficult
05:21to get every Ruth's Chris in the world to do that. If it doesn't sizzle, send it back."
05:26That helped build the brand. With such serious commitment to the sizzle,
05:30it's no wonder that Ruth's Chris has hung around for so long.
05:35Along with those sizzling steaks, another signature dish at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse
05:39is the Creamed Spinach. Ruth Fertel never revealed where she obtained the recipe while
05:44she was alive, though her son Randy did tell New Orleans Music magazine, Offbeat, that the dish
05:50was his great-uncle's invention. As he recalled,
05:53"...the story of the spinach? It's an old family recipe. In my research, I went to interview a
05:58cousin in Houston, and we were driving along to see another cousin, and I said something about
06:02how everybody loves the Creamed Spinach at Ruth's Chris, and she said, you know, that's Uncle Martin's
06:07Creamed Spinach."
06:08Randy believed that it would have been a great idea to tell diners that the recipe
06:12was a treasured family recipe, but his mother saw things differently. He chalked her secretiveness
06:18up to her pride. As he explained,
06:20"...I think it was all about my mother's ego. She wasn't going to share the fact that it
06:25wasn't her recipe."
06:26"...Hey, I thought y'all had steak?"
06:28"...Oh, we do. On the second page of your menus."
06:31If you haven't been eating at Ruth's Chris for every decade that it's been open,
06:35you might not realize that the restaurant made the switch from dry-aged to wet-aged steaks,
06:40as Randy Fertel revealed in his memoir. His mother did this to maintain more consistency.
06:46Dry aging presents some disadvantages, like the additional cost of cold storage along with a
06:51certain degree of loss, which results in the meat becoming more expensive in the long run.
06:55Another problem with dry-aged beef was spoilage. As Randy recalled,
07:00"...Mom weekly lost a few steaks to such taint when customers turned up their noses."
07:05While Fertel would quickly get the customers a replacement steak,
07:08she also believed that the whole experience gave the restaurant a bad reputation for those
07:12customers. So she decided to switch to wet-aged steaks, which are aged after being vacuum-packed
07:18in plastic and don't go bad. However, while wet-aged beef may deliver more consistency,
07:24it tends not to be as robustly flavored as dry-aged meat.
07:29In 2005, New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and Ruth's Chris Steakhouse was one of
07:35many businesses affected by the fallout. The flagship location on Broad Street was badly
07:40damaged by the floodwaters, and it never reopened. The chain's corporate offices,
07:45which were located in the New Orleans suburbs of Metairie, were also flooded,
07:50which led to a big change. Ruth's Chris executives got together for a meeting to
07:54figure out their next move, and they ultimately determined that the situation in New Orleans was
07:59simply too tenuous. Thus, they decided to move the company's corporate headquarters
08:04to Orlando, Florida. As chief executive Craig S. Miller told The New York Times,
08:09"...it was probably one of the toughest decisions that I ever had to make,
08:12to tell my people that we are not going back."
08:15One of the most beloved aspects of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse is its reputation for promotional
08:20offerings, such as giving moms a $25 credit on Mother's Day. One particularly notable promotion
08:27occurred in 2019 at a Ruth's Chris location in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that promised a free
08:33steak to anyone with the name Chris, or a variation such as Christopher or Christina.
08:38Specifically, they would receive a free 8-ounce petite filet. As Paul Hanna,
08:43the restaurant's general manager, announced,
08:46"...we have loved bringing this excellent steakhouse legacy to the Ann Arbor community
08:50for over five years and we'd like to thank the community once again for their continued support.
08:55This summertime promotion is a fun and unique way for us to pay it forward."
08:59Another Ruth's Chris promotion offered a special gift to the Class of 2019.
09:04All nine of the restaurant's North Carolina locations honored graduates by offering them
09:10a complimentary three-course dinner from the seasonal classics menu.
09:13The expectation was that graduates would be dining with their families,
09:17as the offer was contingent on the purchase of an additional four adult entrees.
09:23In the spring of 2020, Congress passed a $2 trillion stimulus package to address the
09:28economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Included in the package was the Paycheck
09:34Protection Program, a $349 billion fund administered by the Small Business Administration,
09:40intended to provide low-interest loans for small businesses with fewer than 500 employees.
09:46Alas, two weeks after its April 3 launch, the PPP had completely run out of money.
09:51It soon became apparent that some not-so-small businesses exploited a loophole, with large
09:57corporations able to collect loans if those companies had fewer than 500 employees in one
10:02of their locations. Ruth's Hospitality Group, corporate parent of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse,
10:08was one of those companies, as it received two $10 million loans for two of its properties.
10:14Outrage erupted in light of the fact that Ruth's Chris had made $42 million in profit
10:20on $468 million in revenue in 2019. Furthermore, the company had $86 million on hand in cash
10:29reserves. It also didn't help that Ruth's Chris had furloughed a significant number of employees.
10:35Meanwhile, numerous independently-owned restaurants throughout the country were
10:38unable to get a dime in loans when the PPP fund ran out. Eventually, a Change.org petition was
10:44launched, demanding that the corporate owners of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse return their loans.
10:49As the petition stated,
10:51"...many small businesses are now being told there is no money left for them,
10:54and they cannot pay their employees and may have to close forever. This is a travesty
10:59and a disgusting display of corporate greed during a time of disaster."
11:03Soon after its launch, the petition received more than a quarter million signatures,
11:07and on April 23, 2020, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse announced that it would return the $20 million
11:14in loans. But it wasn't all bad press for Ruth's Chris during the pandemic, as one location in
11:19Granger, Indiana, offered free meals to its laid-off staffers and their families once per
11:24day on weekdays via curbside delivery. Ashley Kiles, one of the laid-off employees, told WNDU
11:31News,
11:32"...I always knew that I did work for great people and a great establishment,
11:36but unfortunately when hard times happen, they happen. And here we are,
11:40and they are standing right by my side, letting me know that everything is going to be okay."
11:45When this whole tragedy hit,
11:48the first thing we thought of is, what is going to happen to our 75 employees?