CHICAGO — On a biting December evening, the St. Clair Supper Club in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood offered an escape out of the weather — and into America’s culinary past.
In the dimly lit basement dining room, wood paneling covered the walls, and paper place mats cheerily proclaimed, “We’re glad you’re here!” A cushioned leather strip ran around the lip of the long bar, inviting guests to lean in for a while. Over the speakers, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” gave way to Gordon Lightfoot crooning “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Enjoying the ambience were young couples on dinner dates and groups of friends gathering for holiday martinis. And on nearly every table, wading in pools of redolent jus, were great rosy slabs of prime rib — the charismatic megaprotein that for so many decades defined a sense of middle-class American plenty.
But the year, despite all appearances, was 2023.
The St. Clair Supper Club simulates a dining experience that once was widespread, one that still can be found in any number of towns in Wisconsin, Illinois or Pennsylvania. But it is run by Grant Achatz, one of the most inventive chefs in the United States. He has created a sort of prime-rib museum, honoring not just the lavish cuts of beef on the plate but what they symbolize: a lost dining culture of accessible, midcentury abundance.
This notion is particularly powerful at Christmastime, when consumers buy 70% of all prime rib sold in the United States in a given year, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The stockpiling and flash-freezing of these cuts starts in May. All summer, as grocery stores are selling mostly burgers for the backyard grill, the beef industry is already thinking about the biggest-ticket sale of the year: December’s standing roast.
“We see on holidays and special occasions the times when the kind of longer traditions and deeper histories of how we relate to food come out in ritual,” said Joshua Specht, author of “Red Meat Republic” and associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.
“What time of year is it more important to represent that things are going well than Christmas?” he added.
The St. Clair patrons aren’t the only ones indulging in a little nostalgia. Even as steak prices have climbed to an all-time high — and as serious climate and health concerns around beef have arisen — the demand for prime rib has grown over the past 20 years. At Christmas, in particular, the magnetism of a rib roast is real, with about 33 million pounds sold during last year’s holiday season.
It may be a dish from the American past, but it is a past that many Americans are eager to revisit.
The popularity of prime rib exploded in the United States after World War II. The United States was the world’s dominant superpower, the economic future looked bright, and beef — which had been rationed for years — was back on the table.
Amy Bentley, a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of “Eating for Victory,” called the cut “a powerful symbol of abundance.”
“That big roast in the middle with the side dishes was a symbol of a meal that was fit for Americans,” she said. “‘Freedom From Want’ was Norman Rockwell’s way of describing it.”
A print ad from the American Meat Institute in the mid-1940s connected those ideas quite literally. Under a photo of a raw standing rib roast on a crimson background, the text read, “This is not just a piece of meat … This is a symbol of man’s desire, his will to survive.” Published in Life magazine — the mass-market bible of white, middle-class America — the campaign was seen by millions.
The gendered nature of that early pitch language found its way onto the menus of the prime-rib restaurants that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s — places where you could get “Paul Bunyan’s Cut” or the “King Henry VIII Cut” or, for less hungry diners, the “Queen Cut” or “Ladies Slice.”