Dubai: Steaks and date night at Ruth’s Chris (CLOSED)

Update: Ruth’s Chris in Dubai Marina is now closed

For quite a while, Poul and I have tried to embrace a healthier lifestyle. We’ve cut down on red meat, we eat a lot of vegetables and we’ve even started going to the gym or the pool every day.

The transformation to our new healthy life was tough. We were both climbing on the walls, craving Coke (regular, not zero), Doritos and our daily TV chocolate bar (you can’t watch TV without eating chocolate, everybody knows that), but we got through without giving in. Last week, we therefore decided to reward ourselves with a dinner at Ruth’s Chris at The Address, Dubai Marina.

“Ruth’s Chris?” you probably think. “Isn’t that a steak restaurant? Where do big fat-marbled steaks fit into a healthy lifestyle?”

Well, we’re not fanatic and we love a good steak, but instead of eating supermarket steaks whenever we feel for it, we’ve instead decided that we only eat steak once or twice each month, and then we eat at a really nice place.

Steak restaurants in Dubai are expensive, and I don’t want to jeopardize my dirhams, so I always look at the kind of beef served, before I make a reservation. Ruth’s Chris serves USDA Prime beef, which is the highest grade of American beef. It takes a lot to spoil meat of that quality, and I’ve never had a USDA prime steak that I didn’t like.

We ordered oysters as an appetizer, but they weren’t available that day, so we chose seared tuna instead. It was a nice dish of tender, red tuna surrounded by a surprisingly fierce, pepper sauce.

When I’m hungry, I feel like I can eat a whole cow, and both Poul and I were tempted to order the 16oz (450g) rib eye steak, but then reality kicked in, and we realized that the 12 oz (350g) steak would be more than enough.

Poul had red wine sauce with his steak and I had béarnaise with mine. We also had a couple of sides including potatoes au gratin, green asparagus and creamed spinach. The waiter warned us that it would be a lot of food, which I think was really nice of him and very different from the usual upselling, you often experience at restaurants in Dubai.

The founder of Ruth’s Chris, Ruth Fertel, was a divorced woman, who bought a restaurant in New Orleans back in 1965 to be able to make enough money to send her kids to college. She even cut the steaks by hands in the beginning. Steak houses are usually very macho places, so I think it’s cool that there’s a woman behind Ruth’s Chris.

The steaks at Ruth’s Chris are seared in a special broiler at very high temperatures (above 900°C) and served on a hot ceramic plate sizzling in butter. It was a heavenly sound, but all that heat made my steak go more medium than rare.

It didn’t really matter though, because the steak was still really juicy and tender and so full of that je-ne-sais-quoi, which some people call umami. I think it’s the taste of calories:)

Of course, we were much too full for dessert, so after finishing our steaks, we asked for the bill and went for a short walk down to Pier 7, where we ended the evening with drinks and shisha (hookah) at the open air lounge bar at Atelier M.

Ruth’s Chris in Dubai is now closed, but I have had other great steaks at Ruth’s Chris in the US. Read about our Christmas dinner at Ruth’s Chris in Fort Lauderdale >>