Why is ruth chris steakhouse named that

Earles had formerly managed a group of restaurants called Commander's Palace. Earles, Giardina, Fertel, and a group of seasoned staff spent a month on average at each restaurant that opened, making sure that the new restaurant conformed to the chain's standards. By there were 17 Ruth's Chris restaurants across the United States. Twelve were owned by eight franchisees, and the remainder were under Fertel's direct control.

By that year the chain was the largest in the upscale steak house market. Its closest competitors were the Palm, with ten restaurants, and Arnie Morton's, a seven-unit steak house group. Not only had she put boundless energy into the running of her restaurants, but she made sure that franchisees delivered the same quality as the original steak house.

Furthermore, despite growing national health concerns about fat, red meat, and high cholesterol, Fertel continued to serve huge steaks topped with butter. Meat and potatoes were classics, and she made no apologies for her menu. She was right: no bad news about steak seemed to dent Ruth's Chris. Over the years of expansion through franchises, the restaurants had gotten bigger. By the late s, the average Ruth's Chris seated about and drew close to diners daily.

The chain was a real moneymaker. A downturn in the oil-dependent economy caused some losses at individual restaurants in the late s, such as the Houston Ruth's Chris. But the chain as a whole grew 10 to 15 percent in , and Fertel herself took over the ailing Houston restaurant from its franchiser, sure that more good years were ahead.

Growth up to this point had been relatively slow, but in the late s Fertel decided to expand the chain more aggressively. In Fertel made public her plans to add about a dozen restaurants to the chain over the next three years. By , the Ruth's Chris chain had 28 locations. Fertel was 65 in , and claimed she was going into semi-retirement.

This meant she was working only seven or eight hours a day, quite a cutback. Nevertheless, she was still central to the business, which had a corporate staff of only 11 people and no regional managers.

The company opened its first two foreign locations in , one in Taipei, Taiwan, and the other in Cancun, Mexico. The Taipei location was over a McDonald's, at what was said to be the busiest corner in the city.

The Cancun Ruth's Chris opened in an upscale mall built by a local real estate developer, who also planned to open a Mexico City location. That same year, Ruth's Chris invaded Manhattan. New York was home to many famous steak houses, and Ruth's Chris settled into Midtown, hoping to be one more. At this point, the company announced it planned to double its number of restaurants over the next six to seven years but refrain from taking on new franchisees. Growth would come from new company-owned locations or from new restaurants opened by franchisees who were already running stores for the company.

Fertel was also ready to step back from the day-to-day running of the company. Although she retained the post of chairman, in she hired Thomas Cangemi to run the chain as president and chief executive.

His earlier business experience including running Dobbs International, an airline catering firm. The company also added regional vice-presidents around this time, a layer of management Ruth's Chris had formerly done without. While Ruth's Chris announced it would take its growth a little more slowly, it did not really happen that way. It was not the only upscale steak house chain gambling on new markets, and competition began to be more noticeable.

For instance, the year Ruth's Chris opened its New York City franchise, Morton's, a Chicago-based steak house chain, opened a New York restaurant just a few blocks away. One way upscale steak houses advertised was in airline in-flight magazines, since many of their customers were business travelers on expense accounts.

Ruth's Chris touched off an imbroglio with the owner of a Dallas steak house in by implying in an article in a company publication that a listing of "America's Top 10 Steakhouses" used in one such airline in-flight magazine ad was bogus. Ruth's Chris promptly countersued. Over a decade into the tumultuous marriage, Rodney left.

He spent the rest of his life trying to make the zoo a more spacious and inviting environment for the animals but refused to pay for his sons' college tuition. One day she saw an ad in the classifieds for an unnamed restaurant for sale. She matched the phone number on the ad to the phone number listed in the Yellow Pages for Chris Steak House.

She saw that the restaurant had been founded on her birthday , February 2, With no experience working in a restaurant, Fertel decided to buy the steakhouse. She didn't know that the owner of Chris Steak House, Chris Matulich, had previously sold the restaurant six times and bought it back at a steep discount after the new owners failed to turn a profit. Although Matulich promised to train Fertel, he disappeared after the sale with all the cash in the register. She butchered each of the steaks herself, cutting through the bone with a hacksaw.

She'd collapse on a mattress in the back after butchering each pound loin. A week after opening, she invested in an electric saw. Four months after she bought the restaurant, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans, causing massive damage and knocking out the electric grid.

Instead of letting the high-quality steaks in her refrigerators spoil, she cooked them in gas broilers and gave them out free to relief workers and hurricane victims. Afterward, many of those people became regular customers. For 10 years, Ruth ran Chris Steak House as a stand-alone restaurant. She preferred to employ single mothers like herself because she believed they were reliable and hard workers.

Chris Steak House was the only restaurant in New Orleans with an all-female waitstaff. Under her leadership, Chris Steak House flourished. It became a favorite haunt of local politicians and celebrities, including Fats Domino.

Chris Matulich never had the opportunity to buy back the steakhouse. Then, in , the restaurant burned down, six months after Fertel had signed a new year lease. Her purchase agreement with Chris Matulich stipulated that she could use the name "Chris Steak House" only at the original location. But the restaurant's reputation was inextricably linked to the name.

Ruth's Chris founder Ruth Fertel never revealed where she obtained the recipe; however, her son Randy Fertel told New Orleans music magazine Off Beat that the dish was the invention of his great-uncle. His cousin told him, "You know that's Uncle Martin's creamed spinach. While he was of the opinion that telling diners the recipe was a treasured family recipe, passed down for generations, would have been "good marketing" for the restaurants, he chalked up Ruth Fertel's secretiveness about the spinach to her pride.

As he explained, dry-aging presents some disadvantages, including 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 Ruth's Chris Steak House encountered with dry-aged beef was spoilage. While she would quickly get the customer a replacement steak, she also believed the whole experience left the restaurant "tainted" for those customers.

She decided to switch to wet-aged steaks, which aged after being vacuum-packed in plastic and wouldn't go bad. However, as Fox News pointed out, wet-aged beef may deliver more consistency, but "it's a lot less robustly flavored than its more upscale counterpart, dry-aged meat," while admitting it's "very difficult to control perfect aging conditions.

According to NOLA. As The New York Times reported, the restaurant chain's corporate offices, located in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, were likewise flooded. This led to a big change at the corporate level.

The company's executives got together for a meeting to figure out the next move, ultimately determining the situation in New Orleans post-Katrina was simply too tenuous. As a result, the decision was made to move the company's corporate headquarters from New Orleans to Orlando, Florida. Miller, chief executive of Ruth's Chris. According to the Orlando Sentinel , the company initially purchased an office building, but wound up selling the property for less than it paid when the company encountered a cash crunch and needed to pay debt.

In , Reuters reported that some current and former female staff members of Ruth's Chris Steak House launched a class-action lawsuit against the company, alleging gender discrimination.

This was particularly ironic for a restaurant that was once renowned for hiring only women for its wait staff. While the lawsuit originally came from three women, a U. District judge ruled that the original suit could be amended to a class-action suit on behalf of all female Ruth's Chris employees. According to Reuters , the lawsuit claimed that "the work environment at RCSH is one that is demeaning to women [and] reflects a culture of male domination and female subjugation," among other allegations.

She created a legendary culture of hospitality and service, and we are proud to continue to nurture and foster our inclusive environment. Ruth's Chris Steak House does not tolerate discrimination of any kind in our family of restaurants," said Henry, promising the company would "vigorously defend our position. According to Detroit's WXYZ News , the restaurant launched the "summertime promotion" as a "fun and unique way for us to pay it forward" to its customers.

Anyone who's named Chris or a variation such as Christopher or Christina would receive a free eight-ounce petite filet. Meanwhile, another promotion offered a special gift to the class of As Charlotte's Spectrum News reported, all nine Ruth's Chris locations in North Carolina honored graduates by offering them a complimentary three-course dinner from the restaurants' Seasonal Classics Menu.

Two weeks after its April 3 launch, however, the PPP had completely run out of money.