Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Smith & Wollensky
Smith & Wollensky opened in 1977 on Manhattan's East Side, founded by restaurateur Alan Stillman, who reportedly picked the restaurant's name by combining two surnames pulled at random from a phone book, deliberately choosing a name that sounded like it could belong to an old-money, established steakhouse despite the restaurant being brand new. Stillman had already built a reputation in New York hospitality as the founder of T.G.I. Friday's a decade earlier, and Smith & Wollensky represented a deliberate pivot toward upscale, classic American steakhouse dining rather than the casual bar-and-grill format that had made his earlier venture successful. The original Manhattan location's distinctive lime-green awning and facade became one of the most recognized visual signatures of any steakhouse in the city, and the chain has since expanded to locations across multiple major American cities while maintaining that same classic steakhouse format at each one. Smith & Wollensky's combination of its genuinely invented, phone-book-sourced name and its founder's pivot from casual dining into classic steakhouse territory has made it one of the more unusual origin stories among America's most recognized steakhouse chains.
VS
Bern's Steak House
Bern's Steak House opened in 1956 in Tampa, Florida, founded by Bern Laxer, who built the restaurant around an unusually vertically integrated approach — for years operating its own hydroponic vegetable farm specifically to supply the kitchen, an ambition rare for a steakhouse of any era. The restaurant's wine cellar has grown into one of the largest in the entire world, reportedly holding several hundred thousand bottles across an inventory that requires its own dedicated tour for interested diners, a collection built up over decades that's become as central to Bern's reputation as its steaks. Bern's dessert room, located upstairs in individual private booths equipped with their own sound systems, offers a separate dessert-and-coffee menu distinct from the main dining room, letting guests move to a genuinely different physical space to finish a meal rather than simply ordering dessert at their original table. Bern's Steak House's combination of its hydroponic farm-to-table sourcing decades before that became a mainstream restaurant trend, one of the largest wine cellars in the world, and its distinctive private-booth dessert room has made it one of the most singularly unusual and ambitious steakhouses anywhere in the country.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Smith & Wollensky
About Bern's Steak House
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
