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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.
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Ruth's Chris Steak House
Ruth's Chris Steak House traces back to 1965, when Ruth Fertel, a single mother working as a lab technician, mortgaged her house for $22,000 to buy a small New Orleans steakhouse called Chris Steak House, becoming one of the only women to own and operate a steakhouse in the country at the time. After a 1976 fire destroyed her original location, Fertel reopened nearby under the combined name Ruth's Chris — legally required to keep "Chris" in the name per her purchase agreement — and began franchising the concept in 1976, growing it into one of the largest fine-dining steakhouse chains in the United States. The chain became known for serving steaks on sizzling, butter-topped plates specifically heated to nearly 500 degrees, a presentation choice that's become one of the most recognizable signatures in the entire steakhouse category, instantly identifiable by sound and smell before a single bite is taken. Ruth's Chris's combination of Fertel's pioneering story as a self-made female restaurateur and its recognizable sizzling-plate presentation has made it one of the most commercially successful and widely recognized steakhouse chains anywhere in the country.
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