Ruth's Chris Steak House — Restaurant in Asheville

My birthday dinner 2025 at Ruth’s Chris Asheville was spot on. We enjoyed leisurely cocktails at the bar when we first arrived. I ordered a Grey Goose Dirty Martini, perfectly made and icy cold. The bartenders were amazing and extremely knowledgeable. We had a great time chatting with them. After cocktails, we moved into the beautiful dining room where we started off our meal with their signature Chopped Salad, which is our favorite.

Their Chopped Salad is a unique salad creation, consisting of a mixture of julienned salad greens and hearts of palm, bacon, croutons, crumbled blue cheese, hard boiled eggs, mushrooms, olives and onions. It is all tossed together in a delicate lemon-basil dressing and beautifully presented as a formed salad tower, topped with crispy onion threads. Oh my! Oh my!

Our Classic Filet Mignons were seared to a perfect rare and served sizzling in butter on a very hot plate. Ruth’s Chris magnificent Filet Mignon is the “ultimate exquisiteness” of exceptional tenderness and beef flavor. You close your eyes and savor every bite. The beef filets are so incredibly delicious. The best of the best.

We ordered vegetable sides that we share. The Grilled Asparagus with a serving of Hollandaise Sauce was delicious. The asparagus was grilled to a perfect tender-crisp. We also ordered Ruth’s Chris famous, classic creamed spinach that is always luxuriously silky and flavorful. It is our favorite vegetable dish of all.

We ended our dining experience with the delicious, piping hot coffee and the best carrot cake we ever had in our life! Most carrot cakes have an excessive amount cream cheese icing where you can’t taste the carrot cake itself. Ruth’s Chris Carrot Cake was not like that at all. This incredible cake was an eye-popping tall wedge of a very moist and flavorful carrot cake with THREE layers of the perfect amount of creamed cheese icing. The perfect balance of sweetness. Baby Bear Right! Their Carrot Cake makes you say “Oooooo” when it is presented to you and ‘“WOW” as you devour it, forkful by forkful.

We splurged on a bottle of 2022 Caymus Cabernet. Perfect choice, this wine was superb! It will now be our favorite one to order.

Ben was our server extraordinaire. Very friendly, extremely knowledgeable, elegant and charming. Ben made sure that everything was perfect and saw to every dining need. We enjoyed and appreciated Ben and will request him each time we dine there. Thank you to Ben for making my birthday so special!

The entire staff at Ruth’s Chris is exceptionally talented and very highly trained. Every single staff member there have meet and have exceeded the highest caliber of hospitality there is.

From the parking attendants, the hostesses, the bartenders, the entire wait staff and servers, the chefs, the entire kitchen staff, the managers….from Front of House to Back of House…every single person working there is equally impressive. It takes an entire team of talented and dedicated people who deeply care. Because of them, they make a restaurant successful and your dining experiences exceptional. Second to none, Ruth’s Chris succeeds…. every single time.

It all was excellent! Beyond excellent! Thanks to all of them. We have been dining at Ruth’s Chris for countless years. Ruth’s Chris Asheville is just amazing! They always made our dining experiences very, very special. Amazing food that is always cooked to perfection, fabulous wine, perfect service and to top it off…. being with my handsome and amazing guy….it could not get any better than this. Life is good!...

SNAPSHOT = high quality and standards invite very high expectations which are consistently met and exceeded - details below.

I have been a fan of Ruth's fur many years now and am particularly fond of this location. Go to any Ruth's and you will find great food and professional staff to deliver the "Ruth's Experience." Somehow, its even better here. Perhaps because so many visits make for familiarity.

We have had so many great servers over all the times we've come. We love Happy Hour in the bar. I have come to greatly appreciate Andrew the bartender and the breadth and depth of the bar here. Several Tequilas from which to choose. Several Gins, Whiskeys and other spirits along with a smart selection of local beers on tap.

This past visit we were with Jessica in the bar for Happy Hour. As Jessica says, "Happy Hour makes everybody happy!" So does Jessica! She brings such great joy to work and then shares it. What a sweet delight she is. She just makes people happy. Jessica is great. She is a great server and comes with my highest recommendation.

On the next Happy Hour visit, Jessica made a point of coming over to say hello, refill water glasses and offer to-go boxes even though we weren't her table. This is what sets Ruth's apart. This is professional service.

Over the years i have come to appreciate the servers and staff here:

Jessica Candy Ryan Steve Mae Nicole (hostess) Diana (manager) Dana Hagan (General Manager)

I am, regrettably, overlooking many whose names I cannot immediately recall.

At the front desk, we again saw Nicole who is just great. This last time, we met Zoe who is one of the newer managers (about 5 months in the role at the time of this review).

Fabulous franchise here makes for a truly special experience whether its Happy Hour in the bar (you can also sit outside for Happy Hour) or the more formal event in the dining room.

Two suggestions for Ownership:

(1) please include photos for bartenders, servers and hosting staff. I would probably never make this suggestion to other restaurants. But Ruth's is special. Each of these folks go to great lengths to build and then cultivate genuine relationships with returning/regular guests. I absolutely believe Ruth's in Asheville is very serious about serving guests as a seemless team to consistly deliver memorable dining experiences. Guests should be afforded the opportunity to request a server they particularly like. The web site is in need of an update to reflect this notion. Personally, I would have great fun making a reservation and requesting a server I hadn't yet had while also going back to servers I really appreciate.

(2) Take your fantastic bar up a level higher still and offer coke, tonic soda water and other cocktil ingredients and not rely on the soda gun at the bar. A Tito's & Tonic is so much better with bottled tonic. I suspect only a minority of guests will ever take you up on this, but we will love you that much...

While I’ve had good experiences here, my most recent dining experience was incredibly awful. Group of 5, 6:30 reservation, on a Thursday. First off, I arrived with one friend early. We had made a dessert to surprise our friends who we were dining with. I asked at the host stand if they could hold the dessert in the fridge in the back until after our meal. Upon asking I was met with scowling faces from the hostess and the manager. Here’s the thing, I work in the restaurant industry. It’s not uncommon to put a dessert in the back for a surprise. So, making faces at us as if they were better than keeping a dessert cold for us seemed super disrespectful. At a place like Ruth’s Chris aren’t you paying for incredible customer service? A different manager came over and took the dessert. My group all arrived by 6:25. Yet, we weren’t sat until 6:45. There were parties who had reservations after us that were sat before us. Why make a reservation for 6:30 if you’re not going to be sat at that time? Rather we stood awkwardly at the front with judgmental looks from the hosts the entire time. Upon being sat it took over 20 minutes for our server to take a drink order. Service continued to be terrible with our server providing us with sarcastic remarks, shaming of us for ordering a lot of food, and utter disrespect by making inappropriate jokes. Absolutely horrendous experience! And to top it all off, when it came time for dessert, I mentioned to our server that we had something in the back. He went to look for it, time passed by, and then the same rude manager from the host stand returned to the table asking “What did your cake look like?” We didn’t have a cake. I told her this. I assume at that point she recalled who I was because she then announced to the entire table what dessert I had made and that she remembered me bringing it in. So much for the surprise. Ruined it. After she left the table, our server returned 10 minutes later saying that he couldn’t locate a cake. Once again, there was never a single time that any member of our group mentioned a cake. Such terrible communication between employees. Being a bartender and manager of a restaurant myself, I cut restaurants and servers a lot of slack. I understand that things can happen and that sometimes things go awry without intention. However, I have never witnessed such terrible service nor have I had a worse guest experience than I did at Ruth’s Chris Asheville. If ever asked I will continue to stray my guests away from this restaurant. The only redeeming quality is the food was great, however, for the price you’re paying, you’re not paying for good food. You’re paying for an experience. And in this instance, we paid to experience being humiliated and treated as less than. Three members of my group had never dined at a Ruth’s Chris before, and now they will never be back. It was that bad of...