The Celebrity Steakhouse

Reviews of bad celebrity restaurants really are shooting fish in a barrel, but I couldn’t help chuckle at this Defector review of the Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce owned steakhouse in Kansas City, both because of the obviously questionable food and because of the people who actually go to this kind of restaurant.

The same can’t be said of the patrons. Every time I looked around the room, diners looked back with the defiant stares of people who are used to being watched. The restaurant seems to be drawing in its target clients: people who fly private. On my first visit, our server—a very friendly woman named Debbie—told us she had two tables that had flown in just for dinner. 

“There’s this thing I learned about,” she said. “Did you know they have an Uber Jet?” 

I did not. I sensed that Debbie and I had both learned this against our will. 

To be fair, one of the reasons I kept looking around the room was that everyone’s drinks were on fire. This was, I learned, The Alchemy ($22), a cocktail the restaurant created for Taylor Swift, a woman who has never had to use Uber Jet. 

I ordered one, too, and a dedicated server brought out a martini glass with some steel wool tangled around the stem. (Something else to know about 1587 Prime: there are at least two employees whose main job appears to be setting things on fire.) 

“How many tables order this every night?” I asked. 

“Almost all of them,” she said, with just a hint of resignation.

She lit the drink. The steel wool pulsed with a warm, luxurious shimmer before almost immediately fizzling into a cold pile (yes, this is a metaphor). “The stem might be a little hot,” she warned, pawing the nest away from the glass. The drink tasted like a Cosmo someone had strained through a French Vanilla Yankee Candle. 

The Alchemy is in a section of cocktails titled “The Players,” named for the steakhouse’s famous guests. For Mahomes fans, there’s the “Showtime” ($19), a rum and coconut cocktail made with a “Coors Light syrup” that I tragically could not taste. I preferred Kelce’s “Big Yeti” ($24), a nocino-enhanced old fashioned with bitter chocolate notes. 

….

Much of the menu at 1587 Prime reads like magnetic poetry for people with expense accounts. If you’d like, you can order a black truffle grilled cheese ($27), truffle fettuccine ($39), tuna tartare with a truffle ponzu ($29), fried chicken with truffle honey ($25). You could not bring a truffle pig within a mile of this place; it would die instantly from a seizure. 

Wagyu? You got it. There’s wagyu pastrami ($42), a wagyu cheesesteak ($65), a bowl of wagyu meatballs and spaghetti for two ($68). There’s a wagyu carpaccio ($33) that also has black truffle sliced thickly over the top, like very expensive bagel chips. 

Even dishes without any obvious high-end flourishes are given a luxury veneer. I liked the homey roast chicken ($37), which had crisp skin and a simple, savory pan sauce. For some reason, the restaurant calls it “marble chicken.”

“You’ve heard of ‘chicken under a brick,’” my server said. “Well, this is chicken cooked under a marble slab.”

“Is the chicken actually cooked under a marble slab?” I asked.

“No.” 

Wealth has always been about signifiers, but no one said they had to be this lazy. That ethos might even extend to the hiring of executive chef Ryan Arnold, who Noble 33 appears to have found by googling “country clubs near me.” Arnold’s previous gig was at the St. Joseph Country Club, a country club in the satellite town of Country Club, Missouri. (Hey, it’s good SEO.) 

…

Of the three steaks I tried at 1587 Prime, only the 10-ounce hanger from the steak frites ($48)—the cheapest cut on the menu—was actually cooked to temperature. If you’d like ketchup with those frites, you can order the Mahomes Ketchup Flight, which a press release from Noble 33 touted as “a nod to the player’s favorite steak pairing featuring a lineup of three unique ketchups made in-house.”

The ketchups are not, in fact, made in-house. Two of the three—a truffle ketchup and a spicy ketchup—are augmented in-house, but my server confirmed with the kitchen that the base for all three was Heinz. (Heinz! This compounded the betrayal. Hunt’s would have at least made spiritual sense, given Mahomes’s old brand deal.) In one light, this is good news: house-made ketchup is almost universally terrible. In another light, I felt a bit suckered paying $15 for three small ramekins of ketchup, one of which was pure uncut Heinz. A representative for the restaurant tells me the price has since come down to $10.

I’m trying to swallow my contempt for the idea of a “ketchup flight” that costs $15 and that is supposed to use on a the frites but which you damn well know is likely to be slathered over the steak. This is Trumpian shit. But then that’s the point. This kind of restaurant seems to be for car lot dealers who want to talk to their buddies about how they went to support their favorite stars and if they are lucky, catch a glimpse of them (though the stars are never going to be caught dead in their own shitty restaurants).

I think the only time I ate at a restaurant like this was about 20 years ago in Phoenix, when for reasons that I do not recall at all, I ended up in a Dan Majerle-owned and themed restaurant. That bastard sure could kill the Blazers with some timely 3s.

In any case, the combination of horrific food, high prices, and celebrity culture combines to seem like a horrible food experience for me.