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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!
Are you aware that right in the middle of your article on the steak is a big ad for Outback Steakhouse and a coupon offer? Ah, the glories of target marketing. You mention “Outback” and voila, a coupon and ad appear. Juicy irony.
Outback makes great steaks … just order them correctly!
She not “he” wanted the steak cooked plainly. She did not want it seasoned. They served her a steak with seasoning and she realized after she took a bite they didn’t cook the steak the way she instructed.
I was about to go all “here we go again” on you but OMG I wish someone had explained it this way to me years ago. Much better than the way everyone is dumbing it down, over-complicating it, or being super aggressive and pushy about it. Usually I come across the third kind. I may have actually taken this seriously back then if you were the first to explain it. Thank you.
So please tell me about grains. I hear they suck — please tell me why.
Grains aren’t bad at all … they’ve been a staple in the human diet for thousands of years. It’s just that they’ve been overhybridized in some cases and people’s guts are a mess from all the meds, sugar and processed foods they are eating. If you have a well functioning gut and prepare the grains properly, you can eat them just fine.
The reason one feels rotten after eating a steak is because it’s protein overkill. Early humans did not evolve eating that much meat, they’d only eat raw meat if they stumbled upon carrion while gathering fruit, nuts, and tubers, which was the aboriginal diet of early humans, the diet on which humans evolved into modern humans. If one is going to eat meat at all, one should only eat 1 ounce of meat a day…yes, that’s 1 ounce, not 1 pound. If you eat more than 1 ounce of meat a day, it just goes to waste, and processing that excess protein taxes the kidneys tremendously, leading to kidney problems and fatigue and feeling rotten, and premature aging. No thanks. Meat also causes the body’s pH to swing dramatically to acidic, so the body must neutralise that sudden high acidic pH with massive amounts of alkaline. And the only place the body can get alkaline is from phosphorus. And the only place the body can get phosphorus is from bones. Since bones are made of phosphorus and calcium, the body will literally dissolve its own skeleton to get the phosphorus from the bones to neutralise the acidic pH from the meat, thus causing osteoporosis. And the calcium that’s left over from the body’s dissolving its bones, what happens to that? It is passed in the urine, thus creating kidney and bladder stones. And since the body has to use such a huge amount of alkaline to neutralise the acidic pH from a massive amount of meat, and since when cells go alkaline they become cancerous, eating a lot of meat causes cancer in this multi-stage process. Another reason to avoid a big steak is that nowadays grass-fed beef is contaminated with radioactive cesium and strontium from Fukushima. So advice on eating a big steak is very, very bad advice for many reasons. Oh, and stay away from ALL grains. That’s another story.
You seem to have done research on beef. However, it would do you well to read the book “In bad taste” by Blaylock.
Outback is what it is… I personally used to go once a year, but because of health issues now, would no longer go there. I strictly eat grass fed grass finished meat. I only eat organic and avoid all restaraunts because restaraunt food is mostly toxic unhealthy stuff. This country needs organic restaraunts that are affordable and accessible. Americans have money, but unfortunately still eat for pleasure rather than to sustain healthy life. They live to eat instead of eating to live… This is our culture albeit a rather poor one.
This is what happened to me at Outback Steakhouse. I ordered my steak sans the seasonings (grill only) and yet when the steak arrived and I took a bite, I realized the mistake. If this happens to you, don’t wimp out like I did. Send it back and get the steak you ordered. You will be happy you did in the morning.
Okay, I don’t understand this comment. He ordered his steak “sans seasonings” and when the steak came he “realized his mistake” and should have sent the steak back. Was it that the steak wasn’t “sans seasonings” (which has always been my experience with Outback) or that his mistake was ordering it “sans seasonings.” Poorly written / edited sentence.
I love eating steak. It is one of the most unique things that I can eat. I didn’t know that rare steaks were easier to digest then well-done steaks.
Thank you for the help. My wife and I started a diet recently, but still want to be able to enjoy an occasional steak. I had not thought to ask them to skip the seasonings on a steak. I think that would help with our diet greatly. How would you suggest we get the steak cooked?
It’s refreshing knowing that we are all human and go to a restaurant on occasion, even The Healthy Home Economist! Thanks for keeping it real!
What is your take on meat glue? I watched a video and it was scary how yet again consumers are cheated, health-wise too.