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How to order steak at a restaurant to ensure an enjoyable experience that won’t leave you with a headache, indigestion, or worse the next day.
I went out to eat at a local steakhouse recently with my extended family for a celebratory dinner. We had a lovely time – good conversation, lots of laughing, and enjoyment of each other’s company.
Unfortunately, the next day I felt pretty rotten for the experience.
While I had made every effort to order food that wouldn’t make me feel lousy or fatigued later, my attempts to dodge the chain restaurant food land mines had failed.
I even had to use my go-to natural headache remedies or I would have had to resort to painkillers to get through the day.
I knew exactly what had gone wrong, and I silently chided myself for wimping out and not saying something to the waiter at the time when the steak I ordered did not arrive as I had carefully instructed.
You know how it goes, though. Sending back your food because it is not served as specified is such an annoyance. At the time, I was having such a good time with my family that I decided to just suck it up and eat the food even though I knew it was going to do a number on me the next day.
This is truly one of the biggest downsides of eating clean, whole foods the vast majority of the time.
When you do eat something that is overly processed or laden with toxic additives, it tends to sucker punch the life out of you for about 24-48 hours afterward.
The optimal digestion and improved health and vitality experienced by eating a traditional diet on a daily basis make the occasional negative event of eating factory foods very, very noticeable.
Those who eat processed foods most of the time don’t seem to suffer from this reality possibly because their bodies are so “used to” getting beaten up by chemicals, additives, and GMOs all the time that their nervous system has stopped even registering the experience.
Does this mean that eating processed foods and apparently not suffering from them is not dangerous?
Definitely not!
I compare the experience to that of an alcoholic who can drink a bottle of whiskey and still appear sober.
Just because the alcoholic can “handle” the whiskey doesn’t mean it isn’t doing tremendous biological damage.
On the positive side, my dinner at Outback Steakhouse provided some good material for this article, so here are the pointers I would suggest next time you go to a restaurant and are trying to order steak in such a way that won’t give you a headache or worse in the coming hours and days.
Skip the Chain Restaurants
The first suggestion I would make if you are going out for steak is to avoid chain restaurants if at all possible.
Chains are cheaper than a locally owned steakhouse and that is why they are popular. That budget-friendly menu comes with a price, however, and that is lower-quality food.
Big companies have significant buying power within the industrialized food distribution system because they buy in huge quantities which allows for big price breaks. This is then passed along to the consumer.
However, food that comes in huge quantities is typically lower quality and processed in a highly industrialized setting.
It would be better to choose a restaurant that only has one or two locations where the owner lives within the same community and is also eating there!
A small restaurant tends to more carefully source its ingredients. For example, at least one steak restaurant in Tampa sources its beef locally from grassfed farms.
Not only would steak from this restaurant taste better than one from a corporate chain, but it would also contain more nutrition too.
Tell the Waiter “No Seasonings”
Another problem with ordering steak out is that when the meat sourced is of low quality, it correspondingly has little to no flavor.
Restaurants, particularly chains or franchises, typically compensate for flavorless meat by brushing steaks with seasonings before grilling.
This makes them taste more like the natural, mouthwatering flavor of grassfed steaks.
The problem with these “seasonings” is that they contain neurotoxic MSG, which will likely give you a headache, nausea, or worse for up to 48 hours afterward.
This is what happened to me at Outback Steakhouse. I ordered my steak without the seasonings (grill only) and yet when the steak arrived and I took a bite, I realized the mistake.
Weirdly, my nose often itches slightly when a bite of food with MSG in it comes near my mouth.
If this happens to you, be sure to send it back and request what you originally ordered. You will be happy you did in the morning.
Order Sauces on the Side
Sometimes steaks are served with some sort of sauce brushed on top. Again, this is typically to enhance the taste of low-quality, flavorless beef.
These sauces usually contain GMO corn syrup, GMO corn starch (thickener), chemicals, additives, and MSG.
It is a good idea to request any sauces (brown sauces, gravy, etc) that come with the steak be served on the side. Then, you can take a small taste first to see if it is made from scratch and might be safe to eat.
Most likely, it will be from a bottle, jug, or packet and not worth consuming.
In that case, just get some butter and garlic on the side to melt over your steak when it arrives, use some salt and pepper and you will be good to go.
Rare or Well Done?
While it is true that a rare steak is easier to digest and more nutritious than a steak with the life cooked out of it, if you are eating steak at a restaurant where the quality of the steak may be questionable, I would suggest ordering it well done. This will avoid the potential for pathogens or parasites in the meat.
If you are ordering steak at a quality restaurant in your community that sources from local, grassfed farms, however, ordering the steak seared or rare to medium would be fine and certainly a more enjoyable and digestive-friendly experience.
Do you have other tips to order steak safely at a restaurant? Please share your experience or knowledge with us in the comments section.
If you’d rather just prepare steak at home instead of ordering out, here is an MSG-free, homemade steak sauce recipe to try!
Better yet, eat vegetarian when you eat out. Less calories and less room for food error.
Good heavens, if Outback is “cheap” food, then we’re all in trouble. My budget considers Outback expensive. And, frankly, my taste buds consider it excellent quality food (although I’m sure their meat is, indeed, not grassfed.)
A medium-well steak should be perfectly safe, though, even when conventionally-raised. (This coming from a girl who is admittedly paranoid about meat being sufficiently cooked.) When beef is not ground, it only needs to be cooked until the OUTSIDE reaches a high enough temperature to kill bacteria, because there’s nothing to carry bacteria into the interior of the meat.
As a gluten-free eater, I appreciate Outback Steakhouse for their delicious food that’s of at least as high quality as what I can afford to eat at home on a regular basis, and cooked with my special dietary needs in mind. I’ve never gotten sick from eating at Outback (and it’s not rare that I feel bad just from eating at HOME, so that’s saying something).
I could never choke down a welldone steak! But i do agree about the seasonings. And you will probably have to double check the butter to make sure it isn’t margarine.
I have said this before. when and if you go out to eat…family friends…work….take actives charcoal. it will absorb much of the bad stuff like MSG. bottle says after you eat take it. take it just before. i took after a few times. by then I already felt like c%^&! started taking first and it worked. no MSG reaction
Just one thing I wanted to point out I’ve heard from many staff who’ve worked in kitchens- Some chefs will utterly DESPISE you for ordering a well done steak (regardless of the quality) and will do some pretty disgusting things to your food before it reaches your table should you ask for well done. Turns out they don’t like to spend the extra time cooking it! Sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
If the steak is so poor quality I’d have to order it well done, lets just say I won’t order it at all anymore.
Excellent info!!! Thank you!
Sarah, you do a great job of highlighting things we need to be aware of. You’ve helped me in many ways. But today I’m going to be the oddball and stand up for Outback because it is the ONLY restaurant we can go too and be sure of getting gluten-free items. Years ago, WAY before most restaurants even knew what the word “Gluten-Free” meant, they knew! They knew about cross-contamination and trained their staff – even down to changing their gloves when preparing salads so that the crouton crumbs on their gloves wouldn’t get on the GF salads. And they never have a problem with adding extra salad ingredients when croutons or cheese are held off. Their servers are trained to know exactly what items are GF. Of course, now they have a menu that lists all their GF items and even tells you what to tell the waiter to make sure. For those of us GF, I would say it is one of the safest restaurants. I think people’s reactions to “unclean” food is an individual response. We’ve never had a reaction from eating at Outback…though we’ve eaten WAPF for almost 10 years, which includes only grass-fed meats, organic foods, raw milk, fermented foods, good fats, soaked grains, no soy/GMO etc. We got so into eating this way that we bought a farm so we could control our food better, since some of our farmers weren’t going far enough in the direction we wanted for our food. Unfortunately, now that we are farmers growing and supplying our food and food for other people, we don’t have any money to eat out, so our eating at Outback is limited to once every year or so. Maybe that’s why we don’t get sick….we don’t eat out….at all.
One point I missed making…when you order GF, the only seasoning you will get is salt & pepper. So that may be why we don’t get sick… we’re not getting the seasonings everyone else is. I also bring my own sea salt, homemade raw butter and homemade salad dressings as well. You can find nice little insulated bags that actually look like a purse, so I’ve had no trouble bringing these items into Outback. Many times it opens up conversations with our waiters/waitresses!
Nobody has mentioned oils that are added to meat as well as other dishes. Most plating tables in the kitchen have a bottle of cheap oil which they pour on the food before service (so the food doesn’t seem so dried out…). Ask for no marinade, no seasonings and No Added Oil. Plenty of information about restaurant oils available.
Yes, that’s an important point about the harmful oils used in restaurants. I was once told by a Red Lobster employee that they coat all their seafood in soybean oil. This means toxic, rancid, free-radical-laden, genetically modified oil. So you’d have to ask for pre-rinsed in addition to no marinade, no seasonings, no added oil. It wouldn’t remove all of it, but some.
I think the oils are what make me so sick.
just don’t order steak. its disgusting.
You don’t know if they’ve used meat glue on it!