Are Steakhouses Restaurants?

A case of convergent culinary evolution

This is, as I like /to call it, a “mostly-urbanism” newsletter. One of the topics that makes up the rest of that “mostly” is restaurants, which I write about occasionally. This is one of those pieces, with an element of the “evolutionary” thinking I like to apply to human ideas. Like I did here, for example, on the history of the “supercenter” as a retail concept:

Some of these ventures may date to the very late 1950s. Some approached the contemporary benchmark of 200,000 square feet. Most of them failed. Determining which one invented the concept is almost the wrong question: What we’re seeing is the equivalent of a fossil record. “Was Great Eastern Mills a supercenter or something else?” is like asking “Was the archaeopteryx a bird or a dinosaur?” The supercenter was not created; it evolved.

What I’m asking today is, “Is a steakhouse a restaurant?”

Of course it is, right? But the steakhouse has an interesting and unique history that distinguishes it from almost all other restaurants.