For three years, Eric Wareheim ate a lot of steak.
We’re talking three steakhouse meals a day, complete with sides and sauces. Towers of onion rings stacked high, bone-in rib-eyes, bubbling pots of lobster mac and cheese, fries and meats drowning in au poivre. His mission in traversing the country was, in part, figuring out how to define the “uniquely American” institution at the center of his new cookbook, “Steak House: The People, The Places, The Recipes.”
The comedian and director who made his name with the TV series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” has, in recent years, dipped into the wine trade as a co-founder of Las Jaras and launched a plant-art business. But of all his enterprises and hobbies, “Steak House” proved the most demanding — and one of the most rewarding.
“I went deep and I don’t regret it,” he said from a red leather booth at the Smoke House in Burbank.
Wareheim, co-author Gabe Ulla and photographer Marcus Nilsson originally set out to document the country’s 10 “best” steakhouses, but ended up visiting more than 70 restaurants — and went so far over budget that Wareheim began financing their research himself. It‘s been a long time, he said, since he’s felt that deep passion and conviction for a project.
“I could honestly say this project was more work-intensive and longer than any project I’ve done, any film or TV show I wrote,” Wareheim said. “Because I really care about the people, it was bigger than just vanity. It was important that I did it right.”
Making of a steak maven
Through Wareheim’s travels in entertainment, wine and food, he’s dined at some of the finest restaurants in the world. But he‘s never forgotten the steakhouse of his childhood, which wasn’t so much a classic interpretation but a place called Seafood Shanty, located in the largest mall in Pennsylvania. He fell in love with the large booths, the AC cranked up high, the seafood and the steak.
Later, he learned his way around eating rib-eye in a tuxedo as co-host of the long-running Beefsteak — an annual steak-centered fundraiser at Neal Fraser’s Vibiana in the spirit of the 1930s-era utensil-less meat feasts described in a classic Joseph Mitchell story.
But it’s not just the steak that Wareheim loves. The comfort and gravitas of a carpeted, worn dining room and a menu that rarely changes are also essential to Seafood Shanty and steakhouses across the country.
“I think that’s the bigger story of this book: the giving of joy that these places do,” he said. “It is their job. It isn’t their job to get a Michelin star. It isn’t their job to get on a blog or make some new dish to wow some hipster. It’s to make the same consistent food for a person that’s been coming here for 50 years.”
And in a time when the country feels more fragmented than ever, Wareheim sees it as a kind of connective tissue. “Everyone,” he said, “loves a steakhouse.”
The son of a German immigrant, Wareheim set out to understand the web of cultural influences that contribute to the modern American steakhouse: There are spotlights on David Chang’s interpretation at L.A.’s Majordomo, where flatbread — or bing — replace traditional dinner rolls and the prime rib features a shio koji rub. Did a fully Vietnamese version of the steakhouse exist? What about a Mexican iteration?
“There are parts of this country that still feel like the Wild West, in a good way,” Wareheim said. “You can experiment, you can be anyone and open up a steakhouse. You can just do your own thing.”
Los Angeles and Las Vegas steakhouses, he believes, lean into the Rat Pack era of red leather booths and massive shrimp cocktails. But by no means do steakhouses need to follow that path, or any other.
Prime cuts
“Steak House” is 200 pages of sheer Americana, and a slice of quick-disappearing history.
Places “were closing, literally, a week after we were there, or bought up by restaurant groups,” Wareheim said. By the time he’d made it to Cattlemen’s, in Dallas, half of it was already demolished to make way for more modern renovations. “Steak House” arrived right on time to capture some of the country’s best mom-and-pop operations.
He’d been searching for inspiration, unsure how to follow his 2021 bestselling cookbook, “Foodheim.”
While shooting a commercial with his longtime creative partner Tim Heidecker, surrounded by large corporate chains in North Carolina, Wareheim took to researching nearby restaurants: a pastime while on the road for every gig.
“That’s all that matters,” he said. “The job doesn’t matter. It’s like, ‘Where are we eating?’”
Wareheim’s restaurant-curator reputation was on the line: Beef ’N Bottle, which he’d found on Google, was an hour from their hotel and he was the only one who wanted to make the drive.
“We get there, and it’s just perfection,” he said. “It was like a William Eggleston photo. And then we met Jerome [Williams], and he greeted us with open arms and said, ‘You guys have a great time tonight, I’m your server and your bartender, what kind of martini do you want?’ And those three things? I get goosebumps just telling you.”
Williams and the other faces and roles that provide the charm and hospitality of a steakhouse are featured throughout, adding context and personality to a tome that provides recipes and history as well as a glimpse behind the curtain. There’s the “cellar rat” turned sommelier who worked at Tampa’s Bern’s for over three decades. There’s Chicago’s Durpetti family, who’ve been serving Italian and steakhouse classics and employ a valet who might even offer you cigarettes from his own stash. There’s the “legend” Katrina, a dancer and bartender at Portland’s famous strip club-cum-steakhouse, Acropolis.
“Meeting the people who make these places run was a joy, and how passionate they were is as passionate as I am,” Wareheim said.
To find these places and people, Wareheim researched restaurants online and asked chef and entertainment friends their personal favorites. (The resounding winner? The Golden Steer in Las Vegas.)
He received rare, full access to Peter Luger in New York City and recipe guidance from the likes of Sean Brock, Jon Shook, Vinny Dotolo and Fraser. When restaurants couldn’t divulge their secret recipes, some attempts required a full reverse-engineering to figure them out — a specialty of L.A.-based recipe developer and food stylist Jasmyn Crawford. A lot of their own recipes, Wareheim said, turned out better than the originators.
He and his team accumulated so much material that they had to cut dozens of profiles and recipes from the final product, a process that Wareheim called excruciating.
“It was brutal,” he said. “It was harder than any film I’ve cut, any video, any piece of writing.”
What remained in “Steak House” were Wareheim’s prime cuts. T-Pain shows off his favorite haunt in Atlanta. In L.A., At Taylor’s in L.A., Wareheim sits down with Bob Odenkirk, Heidecker and John C. Reilly, and they discuss past jobs working in restaurants. (Notably omitted from the book is the fact that as a teen, Wareheim used to flip burgers and would make six for himself, then eat them while hiding in the bathroom; a co-worker narced and he was fired.)
Wareheim is just as interested in rumination as recipe.
What makes a steakhouse? Does it require attention to marbling and dry aging? Must it serve creamed spinach? Can it be Seafood Shanty, tucked into a sprawling mall in Southeast Pennsylvania? The train of thought derails as soon as the server at Smoke House presents a large silver tray, its display slices of cakes layered and its pies adorned with ice cream.
An enthusiastic “Oh wow!” escapes Wareheim’s lips before he orders the coconut cake. Why bother classifying the steakhouse at all when you can simply be wowed by it?
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