There’s a special kind of frustration that comes with dropping $80, $100, or even $200 on a steak dinner and walking out feeling like you just got robbed. You got dressed up. You drove across town. You waited 45 minutes for a table. And the steak showed up dry, gray, and roughly as tender as a hockey puck. Welcome to chain steakhouse roulette, where the odds are not in your favor.
Look, nobody expects a chain restaurant to compete with a white-tablecloth place in Manhattan. But when you’re charging steakhouse prices, you should at least deliver steakhouse food. A lot of these places can’t even manage that. Here are the chains most likely to ruin your night out, ranked from bad to truly hopeless.
Logan’s Roadhouse
Logan’s Roadhouse sits in that awkward no-man’s-land between a casual restaurant and a real steakhouse. On paper, the menu looks fine — an 11-ounce signature sirloin, a 22-ounce porterhouse, a 12-ounce ribeye. In practice, customer reviews paint a different picture. The chain pulls a 3.86 out of 5 on Google Reviews, which sounds passable until you compare it to places like The Capital Grille and Fogo de Chão that consistently land at 4.5 and above.
The complaints are painfully consistent: slow service, mediocre meals, burnt or overdone food, and long waits that make the whole experience feel like punishment. Logan’s wants to be the fun, rowdy roadhouse where you throw peanut shells on the floor and have a great time. But if your steak tastes like it was cooked by someone who had somewhere else to be, the peanuts on the floor are just sad.
Saltgrass Steak House
Saltgrass wants you to know it serves certified Angus beef. That’s its whole pitch. And sure, “certified Angus beef” sounds fancy on a menu. But certification alone doesn’t mean much if the execution is off, and based on reviews, it’s often way off. One Reddit user summed it up perfectly: “It’s the best of a bunch of bad chain options.” That’s not a compliment. That’s a cry for help.
A one-star Yelp review captured the typical Saltgrass experience: “Okay, so the bread was really good. As far as everything else, we were severely disappointed.” When the nicest thing you can say about a steakhouse is that the bread was good, the steaks have a serious problem. Saltgrass is owned by Landry’s Hospitality, a name that’s going to come up again and again in this list — and not for good reasons.
The Palm Steakhouse
The Palm opened its doors in 1926. Almost a full century of history. That used to mean something. Now it mostly means the restaurant is coasting on a reputation it built decades ago. The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 and still has over 15 locations, but the reviews suggest that fewer would be appropriate.
Diners regularly use the word “overrated,” with one Yelper upset that their bill came out to more than $100 a person for food that “wasn’t anything to write home about.” A former employee on Reddit pointed to the chain’s acquisition by Landry’s Hospitality — yes, them again — as the moment quality started to slide downhill. The Palm used to be a place where power lunches happened. Now it’s a place where tourists overpay for mediocre beef surrounded by caricature drawings on the walls.
Del Frisco’s
Sensing a pattern? Del Frisco’s is another former favorite that took a nosedive after being purchased by — you guessed it — Landry’s and billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Multiple former employees have alleged that quality dropped after the ownership change. And plenty of reviews were calling Del Frisco’s overrated well before Fertitta ever got involved.
A 2024 three-star Yelp review claimed the only enjoyable parts of the evening were the service and the bread. Again with the bread. If you’re paying upscale steakhouse prices and the highlight of your meal is a dinner roll, something has gone horribly wrong. Del Frisco’s still positions itself as a fine dining destination, which makes the disconnect between the marketing and the actual food even harder to swallow.
McCormick & Schmick’s
McCormick & Schmick’s was founded in Portland in 1979 and once operated 60 locations across 22 states. As of 2025, it’s down to 13. Its last Portland location — the city where it was born — closed in March 2025. That’s a symbolic gut punch if there ever was one.
The post-pandemic world hit McCormick & Schmick’s hard. The chain leaned heavily on the business lunch and dinner crowd — corporate groups, expense accounts, that kind of thing. When remote work killed foot traffic in downtowns and business districts, the customers simply vanished. The Chicago Loop location shut down abruptly after its lease expired, surprising both staff and diners. Charlotte lost its last location in May 2025. It’s a chain in freefall, and there’s no obvious plan to stop it. Owned by Landry’s Hospitality (surprise, surprise), McCormick & Schmick’s is a cautionary tale about what happens when the world changes and your restaurant doesn’t.
Outback Steakhouse
Outback is the biggest steakhouse chain in the country with nearly 700 locations. It’s also the one people seem most eager to complain about. A 2021 Mashed poll found that 23% of voters named Outback as having the worst steak in America. Almost a quarter of the people polled. That’s a lot of disappointed diners.
Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: Outback uses USDA Choice beef, not Prime. Prime is the top grade, the stuff with all the marbling that makes a steak juicy and tender. Choice is a step below. There’s nothing wrong with USDA Choice — plenty of great meals use it — but Outback charges prices that suggest you’re getting something better than what actually lands on your plate. And the chain has been raising those prices even as diners complain louder. In 2024, parent company Bloomin’ Brands started closing underperforming locations. Customer foot traffic dropped 4.2% compared to the prior year. CEO Mike Spanos acknowledged the problem during an earnings call, saying: “We’ve got to address the quality, we’ve got to address the value.” Most people just know Outback for the Bloomin’ Onion anyway, and the fact that the appetizer is more famous than any steak on the menu tells you everything.
Sizzler
Sizzler used to have around 80 locations. As of 2025, only eight remain. That kind of collapse doesn’t happen by accident. One Yelp reviewer nailed it: Sizzler is “a steakhouse that doesn’t know how to cook steaks.” That’s about the most damning sentence you can write about a steakhouse.
Even the buffet, which was supposed to be Sizzler’s differentiator — the thing that made it worth visiting — can’t escape criticism anymore. One Facebook review went scorched-earth: “The worst steaks we’ve ever had in our lives. We vowed to never go back. And we didn’t.” Sizzler feels like a restaurant that gave up a long time ago and is just waiting for the last eight locations to quietly turn off the lights.
Claim Jumper
Claim Jumper once had about 80 locations. Now it’s down to a handful scattered across the South and Midwest. The restaurant has an identity crisis — is it a steakhouse or a buffet? It tries to be both and fails at both. Diners compare it to a “way, way worse version of Golden Corral,” which prompted one reviewer to dub it “Meh Corral.”
One Yelp reviewer wrote: “I would have had a better quality meal from the gas station.” Another said the buffet food was worse than high school cafeteria food. You get a steak with the buffet, but the steak was described as “so thin and not worth it.” When gas station food is winning the comparison, you know the restaurant has some very real problems.
Sirloin Stockade
Sirloin Stockade has only eight locations spread across Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. Eight. And yet, this tiny chain somehow manages to disappoint at nearly all of them. One-star reviews dominate the Yelp pages. In Missouri, reviews are consistently terrible. The best-reviewed Texas location — Del Rio — manages a 3.5 on Yelp, and that’s the high-water mark.
The complaints go beyond bad steaks. The Paris, Texas location drew attention for sanitation issues, including unclean bathrooms. One TripAdvisor user left a seven-paragraph review of the Round Rock, Texas location that described the desserts as “the absolute worst, most fake, hideous, meal-ruining, and upsetting desserts in all of the state of Texas.” Seven paragraphs. That person needed therapy after that meal. Both Oklahoma and Kentucky have a single Sirloin Stockade each, and both are drowning in one-star reviews. This is a chain that can’t even get the buffet right, and the steakhouse side is no better. It’s genuinely impressive how consistently bad such a small operation can be.
The Real Problem With Chain Steakhouses
There are nearly 16,000 steakhouses across the United States. You’re bound to hit some duds. But the common thread through most of these chains is the gap between what they charge and what they actually deliver. Outback wants steakhouse money for Choice-grade beef. The Palm and Del Frisco’s trade on old reputations that no longer match reality. Sirloin Stockade and Claim Jumper can’t decide whether they’re steakhouses or buffets, so they end up being neither.
And then there’s the Landry’s Hospitality factor. Tilman Fertitta’s company owns Saltgrass, The Palm, Del Frisco’s, Mastro’s, and McCormick & Schmick’s. Former employees across multiple chains have pointed to the Landry’s acquisition as the moment things started going south. When one company owns that many steakhouse brands and the reviews keep getting worse across all of them, it’s hard to call that a coincidence.
The safest bet for a great steak is still a local, independent steakhouse where the owner is in the building and actually cares whether you come back. Chains are built on consistency, but when the consistent thing is disappointment, maybe it’s time to stop going back for the Bloomin’ Onion and find somewhere that takes the steak part seriously.
