House of Prime Rib

What you need to know

The Food

Essentially one dish. Dinner is a fixed sequence: a spinning bowl salad, creamed spinach, Yorkshire pudding, a potato, and a cut of 21 day aged rib roast carved at your table off a silver domed cart. Four cuts, from the City Cut up to the King Henry VIII.

The Story

Lou Balaski opened it in 1949. Joe Betz bought it from the founder in 1985 and then kept the five room layout and the supper club atmosphere unchanged for forty years, in a city that replaces its restaurants constantly. He died in September 2025 and his sons Michael and Steven run it now, having said publicly that they intend to keep it exactly as it was.

For more than thirty years the Betz family served Christmas Eve prime rib at GLIDE Memorial, part of over 75,000 holiday meals.

Practical Info

Price: $$$. Reckon on more than $50 a head.

Reservations: Genuinely difficult. The management’s own advice is to keep the OpenTable app open with alerts on and call as often as you can. The bar takes walk-ins.

Hours: Monday to Friday 5pm to 10pm, weekends from 4pm.

Bourdain: No Reservations, San Francisco, aired August 2009. He ate the full sequence and called it the American Dream.