
Officially promoted as “Not Your Daddy’s Steakhouse,” the female-oriented STK steakhouse is coming to Dupont Circle, Washington City Paper’s Jessica Sidman tweeted this morning.
Wait, steakhouses are gender-specific? According to a 2011 Wall Street Journal article (“Steak for the Stiletto crowd“) on the concept—which now has locations in Las Vegas, New York, Miami, Atlanta, London, and Los Angeles—it seems like it:
The idea behind STK, said Jonathan Segal, the CEO of the One Group, was to create a steakhouse for women. When he visited several area steakhouses, “the majority were full of men,” said Mr. Segal. “If you cater to a female market, men will follow happily and empty their wallets into your tills.”
Via his team’s research, Mr. Segal discovered that women liked steakhouses. “You meet successful and aspiring people there, but they’re always so dark, smoky and dingy,” he said. “And they don’t want a whole cow on their plates.”
STK, then, became a place where women wouldn’t find crab cakes but “crab salads,” Mr. Segal said, and steaks came in small, medium and large cuts.
“We also put our bars in the center of our restaurants,” said Mr. Segal. “Even today we have more tables of women than men.”
If you need a more colorful idea of what a steakhouse for the ladies would look like, check out the video below. It’s, well, quite the production. (And it makes us question how female-oriented STK will be.) As it implies, we should all expect all the ladies who eat at STK to get all sexy while enjoying that porterhouse steak. That’s what ladies do, right?
STK will be located at 1250 Connecticue Avenue NW, just south of Dupont Circle.
Martin Austermuhle