Entertainment
Eric Wareheim wants to feed you steak
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.
Eric Wareheim’s new cookbook, “Steak House,” surrounded by a classic spread from Smoke House.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
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.
While Wareheim loves a martini (gin, stirred and garnished with blue cheese olives, ideally), “Steak House” devotes a chapter to pairing wines with steak. His winery, Las Jaras, just released a Steak House Cabernet Sauvignon for the occasion.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
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.
Wareheim’s new cookbook, “Steak House,” dives deeper than recipes, with portraits and profiles of the chefs, servers and cleaning staff who make steakhouses run.
(Gabriella Angotti-Jones / For The Times)
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?
Entertainment
Bob Spitz proves the Rolling Stones are rock’s greatest band in magnificent new biography
By early 1963, the Station Hotel in London had become an epicenter of the burgeoning British blues scene. On a blustery, snowy night that February, the Rolling Stones’ classic early lineup took the stage for one of the first times, dazzling the audience with ferocious renditions of blues standards like Muddy Waters’ “I Want to Be Loved” and Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”
Multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, the band’s founder and leader, synchronized guitars with Keith Richards, who favored a distinctive slashing and stinging style. Drummer Charlie Watts, the group’s newest member, a jazz aficionado and an accomplished percussionist, propelled the music forward with a rock-solid beat.
Anchoring the rhythm section with him was bassist Bill Wyman, who was recruited more for his spare VOX AC30 amp that the guitarists could plug into than for his musical skills. The stoic bassist proved a strong and innovative player. Together, he and Watts would go on to form one of rock’s most decorated rhythm sections.
Ian Stewart’s energetic boogie-woogie piano style rounded out the sound. Months later, manager Andrew Loog Oldham kicked him out of the band for being “ugly,” although Stewart continued to record, tour and serve as the band’s road manager until his death in 1985.
This April 8, 1964, file photo shows the Rolling Stones during a rehearsal. The members, from left, are Brian Jones, guitar; Bill Wyman, bass; Charlie Watts, drums; Mick Jagger, vocals; and Keith Richards, guitar.
(Associated Press)
Fronting the group was Mick Jagger. Channeling the music like a crazed shaman, Jagger shimmied and sashayed, owning the stage like few lead singers have before or since. By the end of the night, the Stones had the crowd in a frenzy. Although only 30 people had made it to the gig because of the treacherous weather conditions, the hotel’s booker had seen enough: He offered the Stones a regular gig.
“The Rolling Stones had caught fire. The music they were playing and the way they played it struck a chord with a young crowd starved for something different, something their own… It was soul-stirring, loud and uncompromising,” writes Bob Spitz in “The Rolling Stones: The Biography,” his magisterial work that charts the 60-year journey of “the greatest rock and roll band in the world.”
Spitz, the author of strong biographies on the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as well as Ronald Reagan and Julia Child, captures the drama, trauma and betrayals that have kept the Stones in the public’s consciousness for more than six decades. It’s all here: The Stones’ evolution from a blues cover band to artistic rival of the Beatles; the musical peaks — “Aftermath,” “Let It Bleed” and “Exile on Main Street” as well as misfires like “Dirty Work”; Keith’s descent into a debilitating heroin addiction that nearly destroyed him and the band; the death of the ‘60s at the ill-fated Altamont free concert; Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall and other lovers, partners and muses; the breakups, makeups and crackups; and perhaps most important, the unbreakable bond between Jagger and Richards at the center of it all.
Although Spitz unearths little new information, he excels at presenting the Stones in glorious Technicolor. Spitz homes in on the telling details and anecdotes that give the band’s story a deep richness and poignancy.
Take “Satisfaction,” the Stones’ 1965 classic and first U.S. chart topper. The oft-told story is that Richards woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed the guitar that was next to his bed, and recorded the iconic riff and the phrase “I can’t get no … satisfaction” on a cassette recorder in his Clearwater, Fla., hotel room before falling back asleep. But as Spitz notes, the song initially went nowhere in the studio. That is until Stewart purchased a fuzz box for Richards a few days later, which gave the tune a raunchier sound that perfectly matched Jagger’s lyrics of frustration and alienation. A classic was born.
Piercing the Stones mythology
Spitz’s deep reporting often pierces the mythology surrounding the band. Contrary to the popular belief of many fans, for instance, Jones bears much of the responsibility for the rift with his bandmates and his tragic demise.
The most musically adventurous member of the group — he plays sitar on “Paint It Black” and dulcimer on “Lady Jane” — Jones wasn’t a songwriter. That stoked his jealousies and insecurities, along with frontman Jagger stealing the spotlight from him. A monster of a man, Jones impregnated multiple teenage girls and physically and emotionally abused several women, including Pallenberg. Perhaps that’s why she left him for Richards. Over time, Jones made fewer contributions in the studio and onstage, becoming a catatonic drug casualty. The Stones fired Jones in June 1969 but would have been justified doing so a couple years earlier. He drowned in his pool less than a month later.
Author Bob Spitz
(Elena Seibert)
Similarly, Stones lore has long romanticized the making of “Exile on Main Street” in the stifling, dingy basement of Richards’ rented Villa Nellcôte in the South of France, where the Stones had decamped to avoid British taxes. In this telling, Richards, deep in the throes of heroin addiction, somehow managed to come up with one indelible riff after another built around his signature open G tuning — taught to him by Ry Cooder — leading the band to create one of the best albums in rock history. That’s not entirely accurate, according to Spitz.
Yes, Richards came up with the licks for “Rocks Off,” “Happy” and “Tumbling Dice.” But it’s equally true that a strung-out Richards missed myriad recording sessions, invited dealers, hangers-on and other distractions to Nellcôte, and repeatedly failed to turn up to write with Jagger. Far from completing the album in the druggy haze of a French basement, the band spent six months on overdubs at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, where Jagger contributed many of his vocals.
Beatles vs. Stones
One of the more interesting themes Spitz develops is the symbiotic relationship between the Beatles and Stones, with the Fab Four mostly overshadowing them — until they didn’t.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote “I Wanna Be Your Man” and gave it to the Stones, whose 1963 rendition, with Jones on slide guitar, became the group’s first UK Top 20 hit. The Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership inspired Jagger and Richards to begin penning their own songs. In early 1964, the Beatles came to the U.S. for the first time, making television history with their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and playing Carnegie Hall. A few months later, the Stones kicked off their inaugural American tour at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino. In 1967, the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a psychedelic masterpiece. The Stones responded with “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” a psychedelic mess.
The Rolling Stones: The Biography cover
As the Beatles began to splinter, Spitz writes, the Stones sharpened their focus. The band released “Beggars Banquet” in late 1968 and “Let It Bleed” the following year, albums every bit as innovative and visionary as “The White Album” and “Abbey Road.” For the first time, the two groups stood as equals.
When the Beatles broke up in 1970, the Stones kept rolling. With Jones replaced by virtuoso guitarist Mick Taylor — whose fluid, melodic style served as a tasty foil to Richards — they produced what many consider their finest works, “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street.” More impressively, the band, with Taylor’s successor, Ronnie Wood, has continued to dazzle audiences with incendiary live shows, touring as recently as 2024 behind the late-career triumph “Hackney Diamonds.” The Beatles, by contrast, retired from the road in 1966 and devoted their energies to the studio.
Hundreds of books have been written about the Rolling Stones, but few sparkle quite like Spitz’s. For anyone who loves or even likes the Stones, it’s indispensable.
Like most of the band’s biographers, Spitz gives short shrift to the post-“Exile” period after 1972. He curtly dismisses 2005’s strong “A Bigger Bang” and 2016’s “Blue & Lonesome,” a back-to-basics album of blues covers, as “adequate endeavors that signaled a band living on borrowed time.” That critique is both off target and under-developed. Spitz ignores the band’s legendary live album, “Brussels Affair,” recorded in 1973, or why the band waited decades before officially releasing it.
These are small quibbles. Spitz has written a book worthy of its 704-page length; another 50 or so pages covering the later years would have made it even stronger. To quote the Rolling Stones: “I know it’s only rock ‘n roll, but I like it, like it, yes, I do.”
Marc Ballon, a former Times, Forbes and Inc. Magazine reporter, teaches an advanced writing class at USC. He lives in Fullerton.
‘4’, the opening track on Richard D James’ (Aphex Twin) self titled 1996 album is a piece of music that beautifully balances the chaotic with the serene, the oppressive and the freeing. It’s a trick that James has pulled off multiple times throughout his career and it is a huge part of what makes him such an iconic and influential artist. Many people have laid the “next Aphex Twin” label on musicians who do things slightly different and when you actually hear their music you realise that, once again, the label is flawed and applied with a lazy attitude. Why mention this? Well, it turns out we’ve been looking for James’ heir apparent in the wrong artform. We’ve so zoned in on music that we’ve not noticed that another Celtic son of Cornwall is rewriting an art form with that highwire balancing act between chaos and beauty. That artist is writer, director and composer Mark Jenkin who over his last two feature films has announced himself as an idiosyncratic voice who is creating his very own language within the world of cinema. Jenkin’s films are often centred around coastal towns or islands and whilst they are experimental or even unsettling, there is always a big heart at the centre of the narrative. A heart that cares about family, tradition, culture, and the pull of ‘home’. Even during the horror of 2022’s brilliant Enys Men you were anchored by the vulnerability and determination of its main protagonist.
This month sees the release of Jenkin’s latest feature film, Rose of Nevada, which is set in a fractured and diminished Cornish coastal town. One day the fishing boat of the film’s title arrives back in harbour after being missing for thirty years. The boat is unoccupied. And frankly that is all the information you are going to get because to discuss any more plot would be unfair on you and disrespectful to Jenkin and the team behind the film. You the viewer should be the one who decides what it is about because thematically there are so many wonderful threads to pull on. This writer’s opinions on what it is about have ranged from a theme of sacrifice for the good of a community to the conflict within when part of you wants to run away from your roots whilst the other half longs to stay and be a lifelong part of its tapestry. Is it about Brexit? Could be. Is it about our own relationships with time and our curation of memory? Could be. Is it about both the positives and negatives of nostalgia? Could be. As a side note, anyone in their mid-40s, like me, who came of age in the 1990s will certainly find moments of warm recognition. Is the film about ghosts and how they haunt families? Could be…I think you get the point.
The elements that make the film so well balanced between chaos and calm are many. It is there in the differing performances between the brilliant two lead actors George MacKay and Callum Turner. It is there in the sound design which fluctuates from being unbearably harsh and metallic, to lulling and warm. It is there in the editing where short, sharp close ups on seemingly unimportant factors are counterbalanced with shots that are held for just that little bit too long. For a film set around the sea, it is apt that it can make you feel like you’re rolling on a stomach churning storm one minute, or a calming low tide the next. Dialogue can be front and centre or blurred and buried under static. One shot is bathed in harsh sunlight whilst the next can be drowned in interior shadows.
Rose of Nevada is Mark Jenkin’s most ambitious film to date yet he has not lost a single iota of innovation, singularity of vision or his gift for telling the most human of stories. It is a film that will tell you different things each time you see it and whilst there are moments that can confuse or beguile, there is so much empathy and love that it can leave you crying tears of emotional understanding. It is chaotic. It is beautiful. It is life……
Rose of Nevada is released on the 24th April.
Mark Jenkin Instagram | Threads
Released through the BFI – Instagram | Facebook
Review by Simon Tucker
Keep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Threads | Mailing List
Related
-
North Carolina3 minutes agoShooting in park near North Carolina school leaves two dead and several hurt
-
North Dakota9 minutes agoSBHE to Review Ray Richards Alterations
-
Ohio15 minutes agoRanked choice voting ban silences Ohio voters | Opinion
-
Oklahoma21 minutes agoOklahoma launches program letting adults use past credits, test scores to earn diplomas
-
Oregon27 minutes agoOregon work zones see record high in crashes and fatalities
-
Pennsylvania33 minutes agoWu-Tang Clan member opens clothing store in Pennsylvania
-
Rhode Island39 minutes agoGather Round at These Unique, Seemingly Unrelated Rhody Businesses – Rhode Island Monthly
-
South-Carolina45 minutes agoCrossroads 2026: Second South Carolina Governor’s Debate Preview – FITSNews