Recalling Mr. Steak

Yesterday I was telling my wife about Mr. Steak. From my interweb research it looks like the brand is thriving in the Midwest, but the Sacramento location, which stood somewhere near the Border’s on Fair Oaks, is of course lost to all but the memories of those of us who ate there in the 1980s (and before, I assume).

So I was telling Mrs. Cool about it (for the dozenth time I’m sure, although probably less frequently since I started this here web log) and I got to the part where I was describing some of the items on the kids’ menu and I distinctly recall there being a chicken dish on there labeled “Matt Chicken.” Am I remembering that right? I remember from the time assuming that it was a play on “Matt Houston,” the brilliant Texas millionaire/LA private dick (played by Lee Horsley). And that’s about as far into the nether reaches of my subconscious as I think we should go today. Matt Chicken, anyone?

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Author: CoolDMZ

"X-ray vision to see in between / Where's my kimono and my time machine?"

44 thoughts on “Recalling Mr. Steak”

  1. There is still a Mr. Steak alive and well in Yuba City, or at least there was the last time I drove through those parts. (Having grown up in more the Rax household, I have no personal experience with Mr. Steak or the Matt Chicken.)

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  3. Yes, it’s in the mid-west portion of the greater Yuba-Sutter region. In case anyone asks, Yuba City is actually in Sutter County and not Yuba, much like Placerville is in El Dorado County and not Placer. According to the dining page on visityubasutter.com, their local Mr. Steak is actually known as “Sprenger’s Mr. Steak” which leads me to believe it’s not owned by the same Mr. Steaks in the midwestern part of the U.S., like someone acquired it and wanted to keep the Mr. Steak brand (it’s all about branding!) I’ll have to investigate this further on my next trip to those parts — may I expense out a meal to sacrag on this fact-finding mission?

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  6. Mr Steak came in right after Sizzler….

    Sizzler was originally a cafeteria steak joint located in a big barn type building…

    Mr Steak served basically the same thing but the old fashioned way, you ordered from a waitress…

    Both had fanchises in Eugene, probably long gone…

    James Beard from Astoria Oregon had made his mark in NY but Julia Child was still largely unknown, Chez Panisse was a decade and a half away and Jeremy Tower was two decades away from being declared the next Einstein of Food for adding salt to one of Alice Water’s dishes…

    The start of the Hearty Red Burgundy craze, and one could get your Chianti in a straw covered bottle…

    Different times, different cool

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  7. Did anyone else Google “Happy Steak” and discover some national holiday of which I was previously unaware?

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  8. this thread is experiencing what we at the Sac Rag home office like to call “thread creep.” my mental health depends to a large extent right now on determining whether i am imagining that there was a menu item called “Matt Chicken.”

    That being said, i’d like to indulge in a little thread creep of my own: RG your comment about “Sprenger’s Mr. Steak” reminded me of a funny thing that happened to the Cool family on its recent trip to Cincinatti.

    We arrived at our hotel at dinnertime, so we headed out on the freeway to find some (Cincy-)eats. We passed a freeway sign for “Big Boy” and Mrs. Cool and i became very excited to eat at a real Bob’s Big Boy again. When we got off at the specified exit we found ourselves being led to a “FRISCH’s Big Boy”… We thought it was f(r)ishy, so we drove around a bit, thinking maybe this Frisch’s place had plunked down closer to the freeway than Bob’s hoping for the idiot visitor business…but then we resigned ourselves to the fact that Frisch’s was the home of the Big Boy in Southern Ohio.
    http://www.frischs.com/

    From my interweb research, Bob’s and Frisch’s are not related in any way (except that they both have a hamburger called a Big Boy that looks and tastes the same).
    http://www.bigboy.com/ (please don’t google Happy steak big boy)

    Who out there remembers the Bob’s Big Boy on the strip in Stateline, NV?

    Now, please, for the love of my sanity as you can see by this rambling comment, MATT CHICKEN??

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  9. Does anyone remember the Topper’s steakhouse chain. From what I remember there was one on Florin Road back in the 70’s. The chain had a logo that looked like a “t-bone” steak. And the meat was uh….oh, well it was cheap. They gave you a nice salad and baked tater. Who can complain, right?

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  11. My first legitimate job was as a dishwasher at sizzler. It was horrible. The highlight of that job was the closing shift when the cooks would bring back a salad bowl filled with popcorn shrimp. Sometimes they would give me a steak if I would clean out the grease traps for them.

    Eventually I realized that I was working for food like a trained monkey and I quit.

    I miss the popcorn shrimp.

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  12. What about Sizzler’s cheese toast? Did you get leftover cheese toast? And no, it’s not called “Matt Chicken Cheese Toast.”

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  13. Cheese toast was one of the worst parts of the job. The bottom bus bins would be full of a nasty amalgam of wet napkins, soggy cheeze toast, gnawed kebab sticks and silverware we were supposed to risk impaling our hands on the punji kebab sticks to retrieve the silverware.

    I threw away a lot of forks… I didn’t eat much cheese toast.

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  16. Does anyone remember that episode of Arrested Development where Tobias is working in a restaurant called Swallows because he lost his job as a blue man to who turned out to be George Sr. George Sr discovered that being a blue man is the perfect cover and he is now hooking up with Kitty, the blue man makeup artist. Tobias confides in Michael that he wants to get back together with Lindsay and he wants to call her and plead with her to reunite. Michael convinces Tobias that the only way to get back together is to play hard to get…

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  18. And don’t confuse Mr. Steak with Happy Steak – Home of the Golden Spud. (I always wondered where those things lived). Mr. Steak offered a free dinner on your birthday or anytime your cholesterol fell below 200
    BS

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  20. Since we’re up to 20 comments with still no answer to the “Matt Chicken” question, I went all googly and found a restaurant called BJ Clancy’s that has an item called “Matt Chicken” on its kids’ menu, along with other items with names so friendly who would want to eat ’em:

    http://www.foodspot.com/bjclancys/menu.html

    Just for Kids
    (12 years and under)
    Kids meals come with french fries and applesauce.

    Hamburger Hank 3.69
    1/3 pound

    Matt Chicken 3.49
    Tender, juicy chicken breast strips fried golden

    Billy the Shrimp 4.99
    A whole mess of golden fried shrimp (approx. 25 pieces).

    Beef Cassidy 4.99
    Tender sirloin, broiled to your liking (6 oz. USDA choice angus)

    The Skipper’s Scallops 2.99
    6 Surimi scallops fried golden. Served with cocktail sauce.

    Floyd the Fish 4.49
    Golden fried haddock fillets, served with tartar sauce.

    Sam Ham 3.29
    Grilled, garnished with grilled pineapple.

    Frank Furter 2.89
    All beef corn dog on a stick.

    Chester’s Triple Decker Grilled Cheese Sandwich 2.99

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  21. Wow, I wish I had thought of Googling the phrase “Matt Chicken”!! Just kidding. Great find, and I’m pretty sure the Matt Chicken at Mr. Steak was chicken strips too.

    I wish there was someone out there who could provide a definitive answer…maybe someone who took me there several times…and paid…and raised me and sent me to college and stuff…

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  22. Wow, you know about Google too? I just figured that any Matt Chicken menu item from ANY restaurant might appease you this late in our commenting game.

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  23. oddly enough, the more this drags on the more increasingly my thirst for knowledge will only be slaked by a scan of a Mr. Steak menu circa 1984 bearing the picture i have in my head of an intrepid cartoon adventurer named Matt Chicken.

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  25. I worked at a Mr. Steak in high school…YES, there was a Matt Chicken. In fact, Many of the children’s meal names that runnergirl included are Mr. Steak kid’s meal names…there was a beef cassidy, billy the shrimp, sam ham, and frank furter.

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  26. THANKS debbie! Where were you way back in October when I wrote this, I needed you then.

    I’m glad you found us and always glad to be proven right.

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  27. Debbie is correct about the kids’ menu. I worked at the Mr. Steak in Chico in the late 70’s. I was actually looking for a kabob recipe they had, but I guess that is nearly impossible to find at this point. I believe there was a Mr. Steak in Roseville. Is the one in Yuba City still open? The one in Chico had a bar attached called the Almond Tree. We used to play liar’s dice after work. If someone didn’t score, it was called “Yuba City”!

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  28. Jannelle, Did you ever find the kabob recipe? We got to talking about jobs we had as teenagers and someone said they had been looking for Mr. Steak’s kabob sauce recipe! So we “googled” Mr. Steak and found your link…

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  29. Does anyone have the recipe for the kabobs that Mr. Steak had? I have looked everywhere and no luck.

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  30. I worked at Mr. Steak from 1982 – 1984 (high school) in Stockton, CA. I don’t even remember having a kids menu, though I guess we must have. It was a franchise the first year I was there, and had a ‘sandwich bar’ at lunch time. Why would anyone go to a restaurant and make their own sandwich? Confusing. They also had a different menu for Sunday lunch, which we called ‘the geritol express’, because that’s when all the old folks came in for their liver and onions, which wasn’t on the menu any other time. The small steak was called the “petite cut”, which I remember because the Stockton folks weren’t always so good at pronouncing “petite”, and sometimes I’d get someone asking for a ‘pet-ite’ cut of steak. 🙂

    The second year I was there, corporate came in and took over…they fancified the place, and made it nicer…even brought in fancy steaks like Rib Eye and so on. No more wine in a box, we actually had to open the bottle at tableside!

    I got fired in 1984 for writing “Fuck You” on the back of the ticket that I gave to my superviser when he ate his dinner, in some ill-considered idea of a joke. They closed a few months later, so I guess I had the last laugh.

    Fun post, good times.

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  31. I used to be a prep cook oh so many years ago at a Mr. Steak and the kabob sauce recipe was something like french dressing, Open Pit and soy sauce.

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  32. Not to butt in but, I worked at a Mr Steak in the Southeast and the name of the chicken meal on the children’s menu was definitely “chicken little” don’t ask me why.

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  33. I was a prep cook at a Mr.steak in Greeley colorado in the early 80’s and remember making alot of those kabobs.I don’t know if the recipe varied from place to place, but the way we made them was to skewer the meat,green pepper,onion and mushrooms and cover them with straight french dressing. The best flavor is 24 to 48 hours. Then cook and serve on a bed of uncle bens wild rice.I still make them this way for my family and they take me back in time some 20 years.

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  34. My first job was at Happy Steak, on Arden Way near Howe, in 1976. It was a chain, and this one was owned by an older couple who wouldn’t make you work Sundays if you were “a churchgoing girl” so of course I lied and said I was. Since it was near I-80 we got lots of trucker traffic… and there was one weird old trucker guy missing an arm who kept asking me to marry him. (Needless to say, I didn’t.)

    But yes, they advertised it as being “Home of the Golden Spud” and even more special, they served “Happy Toast” with every meal.

    However, the good news was they closed at 9, so I could get out of there when I worked Fri or Sat nights and go to CSUS drama department parties, which didn’t get going until 11-ish after plays closed…. (During the time when the now famous Tom Hanks and I used to cut classes and hang out in the CSUS drama dept’s Green Room and do weird improvs all afternoon to amuse our friends….)

    Ah…how I miss my misspent youth….

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  35. Yes, Matt chicken was on the menu. I worked at Mr. Steak in Boardman Ohio while going to College in the mid 80’s. There is also a website for a Mr. Steak in St Charles Mo that apparently is still open. The online menu lists Matt Chicken. Here’s the link
    http://www.mrsteakstcharles.com/

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  36. By the way, the kebob sauce at the Boardman Ohio Mr. Steak, which I prepared many times, included ketchup, vegetable oil, pepper, onion powder, and worchestershire sauce, no french dressing.

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  37. My dad owned a Mr. Steak franchise and I worked for him for 8 years. I know he has the recipe for kabobs. Also, the children’s menu did not have personal names. I have never heard of Matt chicken. My dad sold his franchise long ago and all his Mr. Steaks are now different restaurants

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  38. I used to go to Mr. Steak as a kid some 25 years ago and I would always get a sandwich called the Fingerlength, which was a hamburger steak of some kind that had an amazing flavor. I was wondering if anyone new how I could track down a recipe?

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  39. There is a Mr. Steak open and thriving in St. Charles Missouri. The owner is a pretty cool guy named Blake. Call him at (636)946-7444. He will be a font of knowledge as he’s worked there since…well forever.

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  41. Mr. Steak is alive and well in St. Charles Mo right on Hiway 70 and about a block from Hiway 94
    My husband I and eat there at least once a month; They still give free meals to the birthday person.
    You can probably get their exact address by calling information. Hope this helps.

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  42. There is also a Mr. Steak in Manchester Mo on Manchester road; (a fairly well known road in MO.)

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  43. Thanks Diane! This is a good opportunity for me to point out again to all the naysayers that I was indeed correct about the Matt Chicken dish.

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  44. Just today, my wife and I were talking about Mr. Steak and how much I enjoyed the Teriyaki Steak. I worked at the one on Madison Ave (in Sacto) for a year or two. It was my first job and very fun with lots of interesting stories mostly of the fun people who worked there. Too bad the chain didn’t last…

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