Putting Meat on the
American Table
Taste, Technology, Transformation
by Roger Horowitz
Johns Hopkins, 192 pp., $19
Despite having spent much of his life in the kitchen, Klaus Fritsch is not a large man.
He is neither rotund like Mario Batali nor in need of a cane like Paul Prudhomme. This is not to say, however, that Klaus is a lousy cook. In the 1970s, he worked at the Playboy Club in Montreal. One day his colleague Arnie Morton entered the kitchen, demanding to know who had made his burger. Klaus took the credit and was told it was the best burger Morton had ever tasted (the secret is tomato juice). The two went into business together and opened the first Morton's steakhouse in Chicago in 1978. I recently met Klaus at the Morton's in downtown Washington. And in the midst of our jovial discussion, I asked him a sensitive question:
You're with a group of friends at a restaurant. One of them orders a steak and tells the waiter he wants it well done. What do you do?
Klaus suddenly sprung from his seat, grabbed my arm, and exclaimed in his thick German accent, "I tell him, you son of a bitch, order a pot roast!" He said he's only joking, but added, "Honestly, if you want a steak well done, I really recommend you get a pot roast. Why ruin a great piece of meat?"
Indeed, Americans take their meat very seriously. And despite reports that red meat can lead to heart disease, or that
Mad Cow and E. coli contaminations have led to some horrific deaths, we remain undeterred. In the first six months of this year, the Morton's chain generated more than $161 million in revenue. The company now operates 71 restaurants around the world, all with identical menus: Large pieces of prime meat, baked potatoes the size of Nerf footballs, and not a single butter knife to be found.
The concept is quite basic but may well outlast other trendy cuisines such as New American. At least that is Klaus's belief.
"It is over," he de clares. "You know, two ounces of fish and two flowers, and on your way home you stop at McDonald's for hamburgers because you're hungry. People figured this out and it was over, so they go back to their steak and potato."
Fritsch considers steak in America to be something ordered on festive occasions: "It goes all the way back to the fatted calf."
Not that we need to go that far back. In a 1939 essay for the New Yorker entitled "All You Can Eat for Five Bucks," Joseph Mitchell chronicled the famous beefsteak dinners thrown by political honchos throughout New York City. Mitchell witnessed one chef "slicing the big steaks with a knife that resembled a cavalry sabre and the other was dipping the slices into a pan of rich, hot sauce. . . . A waiter would go to a table and lay a loaded platter in the middle of it. Hands would reach out and the platter would be emptied. A few minutes later another platter would arrive and eager, greasy hands would reach out again."
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