Steak houses serve just about the simplest possible things – grilled meat, basic seafood dishes – so what sets apart good and bad ones comes down to a few crucial factors:
quality of meat, most obviously. Not all beef is equal, not by a long shot.
quality of other things, like oysters, lobster, shrimp etc.
quality of preparation and cooking. It’s surprisingly non-trivial to grill a steak properly. Seasonings or lack of them matter too. Aging of meat will also drive up prices because of storage costs.
quality of side dishes. At a quality place you should get things like properly sautéed mushrooms, creamed spinach, well prepared potatoes, etc. Simple dishes involving some skill, made with quality ingredients. At a place like Outback on the other hand (got dragged there once… Ugh) you’ll see mountains of deep fried potatoes or onions, or perfectly inedible salads made of iceberg lettuce drenched in mystery goop, and the like.
wine list. A small selection of cheap swill, or a long list ranging from cheap swill to outrageously costly bottles of Chateau Veblen, with some decent but fairly affordable bottles in between? A good place has the latter.
service. A good steak house will have attentive, professional service on a par with any other high end restaurant, a cheap one will be either indifferent or some kind of creepy forced corporate “fun”
Of course, all that tends to come at a steep price. You also generally pay for the fancier location, decor, glassware, china etc. I enjoy the experience but it’s something I do roughly every two or three years at most.
(I have never been to a Ruth’s Chris but have been to a few other high end places… I’d be surprised if any of the above didn’t apply.)
I’m confused now. What do your Final Cut X issues have to do with switching to a hackintosh? Or is it just that this opportunity to illustrate how thoroughly you are sticking it to the man was too good to pass up?
Curiosity finally got the better of me and I checked out Vegas last year. Didn’t like it, for the most part.
What I did notice both from pre trip research and my observations is that collectively the Vegas properties have been weaning themselves off gambling and focusing more on dining and entertainment. I’d hazard a guess that most of those suffering regional casinos can’t begin to compete with what Vegas offers in those realms, so they aren’t drawing as diverse a crowd to begin with.
The other big thing I noticed is that Vegas is swarming with average Joes and their families. No doubt the high rollers are there somewhere, largely out of sight, but in the streets, shows, stores, restaurants and so on the people are by and large perfectly average Americans. I was mildly appalled that people seem to consider this a good place for a family vacation – and baffled that so many love it at all.
But maybe Vegas is emblematic of the wealth gap:
It’s a beacon for a certain part of Middle America, a place that makes them dream, where for a relatively modest price you can be a pretend-billionaire for a few days. But it’s also built almost entirely on swindling rubes by dangling shiny things in front of them. It’s all promise and no payoff, unless you’re the man behind the curtain.
I’m wondering if as a Brit I have a different idea of middle class, since to me (who I’d probably call upper working class - educated peasant stock, basically), I consider Vegas to be appallingly trashy lowest common denominator crap - and I’m including the Venetian and the Wynn in that, I’ve been in both. Horrid, horrid, horrid place.
I think there’s a big difference between a double oven range and a hot water dispenser in a refrigerator. It’s like they don’t understand there’s a difference between paying more for a useful upgrade (as you say: higher value to the consumer) versus paying for something unnecessary just because you can.
It’s been quite a while since I have been to one, but I seem to recall that unlike many upscale steak places Ruth’s Chris had a fair amount of non-hoofed entrées.
That works too, depending on where the speaker thinks they stand; just so long as the intent is “anyone who would dare eat at Applebee’s must belong to a lesser social class than me.” It’s that sense of smug, sneering superiority that I’m talking about.
My problem with Apple is what I said. Gimmicky features that don’t work - Apple Maps, Final Cut X, everything added to iPhoto after 2008. Shorter working life on the computers, No longer engineered to be serviced but for looks. Jonathan Ives made the K2 cases then G3, G4, G5s, mac pros. Now he’s making iMacs you have to dig in through the glass to get into, composed of tiny connectors and laptop parts you have to remove everything to get to the battery. And the donut mac pro, relive the upgrade pains of the G4 cube.
I’m not sticking it to the man. I’m epically disappointed. I’ve fallen out of love. In fact I’m not even interested anymore. I’m aggravated by the new stuff and the way it’s sold.
Apple might not be the clearest example but I feel Apple has shifted from selling premium tools to luxury items. I know Apple has the upper class, upper middle class and vast swaths middle middle class locked down especially with iPhones and iPads. Their new computers are fast and have retina displays but I just feel they have shifted to selling luxury items. I’m not sure their computers are good tools much less premium tools.
Where I grew up, we had a hot water dispenser sitting on the counter in the kitchen all the time, and used drinking hot water (generally in the form of tea) in lieu of central heating for most of the fall and some of the winter months. There exists a use case for the hot water dispenser in the refrigerator - especially considering that it doesn’t take up counter space and you’re (probably) using waste heat generated by the fridge anyway during its normal operation.
Whether you’re going to use the feature is a good way to decide whether you’re going to pay for the feature, yes. But someone has a use for it, otherwise it would never have made it out of market research.
This is actually a more helpfull answer than the one I got from Espresso. Still, I just can’t get even a little excited about a new chain restaurant coming to town. There are too many good local restaurants around here to ever bother eating at a chain joint.
@GilbertWham and @chgoliz - The way I was reading the article, I imagined the customers that are on the rise to be like a woman I used to work with. She wore a Pandora bracelet on one arm, had a couple of anniversary bands stacked on top of her giant diamond engagement band (her husband is a doctor, you know?), an eternity circle necklace, diamond stud earrings. Basically, when you looked at her jewelry the cash register in my mind would start whirring and I knew within a few dollars what her husband had spent to make her happy. Sometimes I thought why not just hang thousand dollar bills around your neck instead; it’d be just as lovely. Anyway, she redid her kitchen and for several months that was much of the lunchtime conversation with her. Another co-worker who was good friends described it as a “$50,000 kitchen remodel.” Which is probably exactly what she was going for - that you could calculate how much she spent on the granite counters and such. One feature I distinctly remember is that she had kids still in elementary school and she had a drawer in her island for kids snacks that was accessible to them. Great idea I guess until you kids get tall enough to reach the cabinets? But I guess she will redo the kitchen then. Anyway, I keep waiting for the dual purpose fridge compartment to trickle down to the hoi-poloi because that seems like the greatest feature ever.
@Espresso - my take on Vegas is much like my take on Disney - that you are having as much fun as you are spending money. At both places I thought, “meh, glad I saw it I guess,” but it wasn’t my thing. I did think the Wynn was freaking beautiful though; I’d love to stay there. When I was there it was when my first marriage was on the fritz and I liked going down in the middle of the night and playing penny slots and being around other people because I was miserable and lonely. One night as I was returning to the hotel room, I struck up a conversation with a guy in the elevator. I was up $20. He was down $10k and had had to wire money into his account to cover the debt - poker player. I think you probably can’t tell who is gambling hard and who is there for the naked ladies, but I think there are people who really like gambling in a way that I understand but fortunately don’t get.
The nicest compliment a contractor has ever given me was in my last home. He was there to give an estimate for some work, and we were talking in the kitchen. I could tell he was looking around while he was talking. And then he commented: normally the relationship between how much a kitchen cost and how much it’s actually used for cooking is an inverse relationship, but I can tell you really do use your kitchen to its full capacity.
I know exactly what you’re talking about when you describe that woman and her kitchen.
Well, in fairness to me I did mention the non-hoofed items you’ll find in a typical high end steakhouse. Maybe this particular one offers even more of them, but it’s really not unusual in general. Not that I’d ever try to convince a non beef eater to go for the spinach and the shrimp and watch me devour a massive porterhouse.
I do share your view that the opening of a new chain restaurant, no matter how good and how fancy, isn’t much cause for excitement.
A very good steakhouse in Chicago used to serve – if you knew to ask for it – Susan’s platter. Who was Susan? She was the long term girlfriend of the owner, and a vegetarian. The platter was a nice amalgamation of the side options. You had to know to tell them not to put gravy all over it, though, which always made me chuckle and shake my head.
Vegas does have some things that appeal to me, and almost all of them are not on the Strip. The arts district, a certain tiki bar, Chinatown, El Gordo tacos (a rare gem on the Strip), Old Vegas (the other exception to the anywhere-but-the-Strip principle). I’m sure there’s more that would appeal to me, but the basic takeaway is that I intensely dislike contemporary mega-kitsch but do have a fondness for vintage kitsch.
As for gambling and gamblers, I’ve met a few regular gamblers in my travels. Most of them have a love/hate relationship with it, but the ones who like it best all have one thing in common: they see it as entertainment, or at least try to; the losses are just the price of admission and any wins are a nice bonus. If winning is the only thing you enjoy about it, then it’s usually a recipe for deep unhappiness.
Maybe I’m just nitpicking – and I should stress that while I might disagree on some details I do respect your overall opinion on this – but it seems to me that these devices are all engineered to be appliances. Appliances that look good, yes, but the main point seems to be that they realized that most people never open the computer in any way except maybe to add RAM, and they tend to get professional help for anything else even if people such as yourself are willing and able to do it themselves. So, they now design the machines to be as small/space-saving, integrated/self-contained and attractive as possible. They make trade-offs like non-user-replaceable laptop batteries in order to achieve the slimmest, lightest possible designs. And eliminating user-serviceable parts probably also reduces the number of repair issues due to botched DIY upgrades/repairs.
In the specific case of the new Mac Pro, I think the idea is that once you configure it the first time, you rarely if ever open it up; you do most of your upgrades with peripherals (for better or worse). I know a lot of pro users are not at all happy with that approach, but it does seem to appeal to others.
I realize there’s a big downside to all this. It’s like they’re saying: “we are catering to the consumer above all, and too effin’ bad if that’s not you.” But the fact that these are luxury items in some sense is beside the point IMO. The very same appliance approach could be taken with low-cost, plain-looking gear. Doesn’t matter if my fridge cost $500 or $5000, either way I have no skills or inclination to repair/upgrade/hack it myself. Just like my computer.
