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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!
Kasey Miller,:)
Travis McMahon
Thank you!
Wow! Good tips and info.
if you want to check out some good sauces to use at home check out country chef grilling sauce on the web.
I, too, seem to have become ultra sensitive to bad foods. I cook almost everything myself from organic sources and try to eat only humane, clean meats and I feel great. If forced to go to a restaurant I will usually try to eat vegetables and fish (if it’s wild caught). It is so difficult to avoid vegetable oils. They sneak it into dressings even if you can get them to not cook with them. Waiters are usually too ignorant of this practice and will gladly tell you that you are getting olive oil. Some fast food restaurants even proudly exclaim that they fry in vegetable oils. If people weren’t so ignorant they would run away when they see that sign.
Thanks for the tips. I, too, suffer ill effects when I go out to eat in most restaurants, especially chain restaurants. I try to avoid it all together.
Be careful about asking for extra butter at Outback. They use a margarine/butter blend that they whip together.
I was wondering what you thought of Chipotle Mexican Restaurant….they’ve claimed to have made some strong strides toward assuring that their meat is grass fed, humanely raised and sourced from local farms…they’ve even put out a mini series against MegaFarms called Farmed and Dangerous….It seems they have somewhat of a conscience, but I’ve never been to their establishments…do you think they’re on the level?
Unfortunately Chipotle is using bad oils and GMOs. They slather the oils on everything or marinate it. I feel the least blah when I eat the carnitas – pastured pork in the pulled pork style. I don’t think there is MSG because I do not get sick when we do eat there and if I am traveling it is one of the places we go to so I am not sick for weeks after we get back. There are very few places I can eat and small mom and pop places are often some of the worst =( I couldn’t get them to give me real butter at one “steak house” in Elgin. They only have margarine! And everyone in town was saying what a great steakhouse it is…
We ate out at Salt Grass Steak House and it was delicious with real butter put on the steak (as I was taught in chef school). They make their dressings in house also though of course still bad oils but no HFCS in the one I picked. I can’t drink any of their various sangrias, “Texas Teas” etc but a Shiner beer draft is a nice treat.
I tell you if I ever get the money to invest I am setting up a chain restaurant that does it right. Chipotle shows it can be done even if they aren’t fully aware… Maybe one day =)
That’s funny. I always think chain restaurants are terribly overpriced, and the food is just not that good. Even in the SF Bay Area, we could generally find better food cheaper at locally owned places. Here, in MT, there is an Outback, but there are also several places that are locally owned, buying the beef from the ranchers, so it’s grassfed, that are both better and cheaper than Outback, or the other steak chain places. Even our local burger joint buys local beef and butchers it themselves.