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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
CUT by Wolfgang Puck
CUT opened in 2006 at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills, founded by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, who built the restaurant specifically to apply his own modern, California-influenced culinary sensibility to the traditionally conservative American steakhouse format. The restaurant's dining room was designed by architect Richard Meier, the same architect behind the Getty Center, giving CUT a deliberately modern, glass-and-steel aesthetic that broke sharply from the dark wood and leather look most traditional steakhouses had relied on for decades. Puck, already one of the most commercially successful and widely recognized chefs in the country through Spago and his broader food-product empire, brought that same brand-building approach to CUT, expanding it to locations in cities including Las Vegas, London, and Singapore while maintaining Michelin-starred recognition at multiple locations. CUT's combination of Wolfgang Puck's celebrity-chef culinary reinvention of the steakhouse format and its architecturally distinctive Richard Meier-designed dining rooms has made it one of the most internationally significant modern steakhouse brands to emerge in the 21st century.
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