Buzz
Back in May 1965, a woman named Ruth acquired a steakhouse from a man named Chris.
Ruth Fertel, a single mother of two working as a lab technician at Tulane University, stumbled upon a newspaper ad for a New Orleans steakhouse up for sale. The original owner, Chris Matulich, who had established the restaurant in 1927, was looking to retire. Fertel decided to take a leap of faith, mortgaging her home to secure a $22,000 bank loan—enough to cover the $18,000 asking price and additional costs—and bought the 60-seat establishment.
Fertel immersed herself in her new role as a restaurant owner, pricing steaks at $5.50 and employing mostly single mothers to staff the place. Although ownership had shifted, the name remained unchanged: Matulich allowed her to continue using “Chris Steak House” as long as the restaurant stayed in its original location.
For the following 11 years, the restaurant remained in its original location. However, in 1976, a fire in the kitchen caused extensive damage, forcing Fertel to relocate. Within just over a week, she transformed her nearby catering hall into a fully operational restaurant and named it “Ruth’s Chris Steak House.” This allowed her to maintain the brand recognition of the original name without violating her agreement with Matulich.
The name change also resolved another problem. As her son Randy Fertel mentioned in his memoir, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, “she had grown tired of being called Chris or, even worse, being mistaken for Chris’s wife. On busy nights, customers trying to secure a table would sometimes claim they knew Ruth before she married Chris.”
If you find the name Ruth’s Chris Steak House more fitting for a tongue-twister challenge than a restaurant, you’re not the only one. A restaurant critic once humorously suggested that repeating the name three times quickly could serve as a sobriety test. Even Fertel herself disliked the name.
“I’ve always despised the name,” Fertel admitted in a 1998 interview with Fortune, four years before her death. “But we’ve always found ways to make it work.”
