Cameron Mitchell is not as nostalgic about the end of Mitchell’s Steakhouse as some of the rest of us.
When you’ve opened more than 100 restaurants during your career, you’re bound to have closed a few as well. And besides, Mitchell hasn’t owned Mitchell’s since 2008, when his namesake company sold 22 of its steakhouses and Mitchell’s Fish Market restaurants to Ruth’s Chris for $94 million.
“One reason I acquiesced to doing this article is because I think there’s still people out there today that think we own it,” he told The Dispatch recently during a chat about the now-shuttered restaurant’s role in a late-1990s revival of Downtown fine dining.
In 1998, it was Mitchell and Mitchell’s that added some much-needed gloss to dining Downtown.
“Mitchell’s Steakhouse is expensive, masculine, oaky, brassy, polished, noisy, exciting and built with success in mind,” wrote the late, great and eminently quotable Doral Chenoweth, who reviewed and covered restaurants for The Dispatch from 1982 to 2000.
Another good one: Chenoweth called Mitchell’s “a tony, expense-account bastion of red meat.” He quoted a local diner’s take as this: “Until now, if we wanted to take someone to a nice place for lunch, all we have Downtown are the private clubs.”
It was designed to impress, and it succeeded in doing so for a long time.
Mitchell’s is the first place I took my now-partner for a birthday dinner. It’s the first place I ordered wagyu beef. As someone who usually lunched on chicken Caesar wraps from Au Bon Pain, I always felt very important when a source or an editor suggested we meet at Mitchell’s to talk business.
But not always. Our Statehouse bureau chief took me there in 2005 to break the news that I didn’t get a job on his desk. I comforted myself with dessert on The Dispatch.
Mitchell’s sleek, modern and elegant style added the touch of glamour that’s always craved by those obsessed with Columbus’ image to outsiders. It was one of the examples Chenoweth cited in September 1999 when he wrote that word finally was getting out about Columbus as a dining destination. (I wrote pretty much the same story 25 years later, in October 2024.)
“It was the grande dame of the city,” Mitchell recalled during our conversation. “It was big time, and people loved it. It was packed.”
It cemented Mitchell’s place, too, as the driver of local dining.
But it very well might have been another Mitchell steakhouse – Butcher & Rose, which opened two blocks away in the summer of 2024 – that finally did in his original.
At the other end of Gay Street, newer, finer restaurants such as Veritas, Chouette and Hank’s Low Country Seafood & Raw Bar also have elevated people’s expectations for fine dining Downtown.
Landry’s Inc., which bought the two Mitchell brands from Ruth’s Chris for just $10 million in 2014, announced the closing of its Downtown Mitchell’s Steakhouse on May 26. Mitchell and probably many other Columbus diners could see it coming.
One Mitchell’s Steakhouse remains, on Polaris Parkway. There are five Mitchell’s Fish Markets left: in Columbus, where it’s called Columbus Fish Market; in Pittsburgh; and in the Michigan cities of Lansing, Livonia and Rochester Hills.
In 1998, after the grande dame’s debut, Mitchell told The Dispatch he created Mitchell’s décor, food and mood with the thought it would “be there for at least 30 years.”
Even without him, Mitchell’s Steakhouse made it nearly that long.
Follow Dispatch dining reporter Bob Vitale on Instagram at @dispatchdining. You can reach him directly at rvitale@dispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Mitchell’s Steakhouse helped revive fine dining in downtown Columbus
Reporting by Bob Vitale, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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By Bob Vitale, Columbus Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
