Ruth’s Chris Steak House is a fine-dining steakhouse, so nobody arrives expecting a plant-based menu. What people do expect is that the vegetable dishes are vegetables. At Ruth’s Chris that assumption does not survive contact with the company’s own paperwork.
Answer: no. Ruth’s Chris publishes a detailed allergen guide, and every single item in its own “Vegetarian Selections” section is flagged for dairy — the Market Vegetable Linguini, the Roasted Broccoli Steak, the Roasted Vegetable Napoleon and Ruth’s Vegetarian Trio, all four. So are the mushrooms, the Brussels sprouts, the asparagus, the garlic mashed potatoes and the baked potato. On the entire guide there are exactly two things a vegan might eat that carry no allergen flag at all: Fresh Broccoli, which is marked regional, and raspberry sorbet.
This is a correction to what this page used to say. The earlier version told readers that the Roasted Broccoli Steaks were “100% vegan,” that the Market Vegetable Linguini was “a purely vegan dish,” that the pan-roasted cremini mushrooms were vegan-friendly, and that the Vegetarian Trio and Vegetable Napoleon became vegan if you asked for the cheese to be left off. Ruth’s Chris’s own allergen guide flags every one of those dishes for dairy. Those recommendations have been removed.
Everything below comes from Ruth’s Chris’s own Allergen Guide (the version marked “Updated July 2026”), its Food Allergies page, its FAQs and its Our Story page, all checked on 28 July 2026.
What Ruth’s Chris Publishes — And What It Doesn’t
The allergen guide is a five-page grid covering gluten, dairy, wheat, shellfish, fish, peanut, tree nut, soy, sesame and egg, item by item, with components served alongside a dish listed underneath it. A “Y” means the item contains that allergen, and the company is explicit that this “includes all cooking sauces, condiments, and fixed accompaniments.” That is unusually good documentation for a restaurant of this kind.
Three limits on it, all stated by Ruth’s Chris itself. First, it applies to corporate restaurants and excludes franchise locations — if you are not sure which you are in, the company tells you to ask. Second, it is an allergen guide, not an ingredient list: it will tell you a dish contains dairy, but it will not tell you about animal ingredients that are not major allergens, and the company admits “due to limited ingredient information available in our kitchens, we may not be able to answer all questions on-site.” Third, on cross-contact: “Because our dishes are prepared to order and our kitchens utilize shared cooking and preparation areas, there is a risk of cross-contact with allergens. While we take care in handling every ingredient, we cannot guarantee that any item is completely free of allergens.”
Ruth’s Chris also declines to answer two questions that matter to anyone eating plant-based. Asked what oil it uses in its fryers, the company says to contact the restaurant or Guest Relations. Asked whether it has a separate fryer, it says “fryer usage may vary by location.”
The Butter Problem
Look at the steak rows on the allergen guide and something jumps out. The 6 oz filet, the 16 oz ribeye, the T-bone, the porterhouse — plain cuts with no sauce, no crust and no complement — are each flagged for dairy and nothing else. That is not an error. Ruth’s Chris tells the story itself on its Our Story page: in 1967 Ruth Fertel found that “a 500° plate with a pat of butter gave a satisfying sound and kept steak hot to the last bite,” and later designed an 1800-degree broiler to reproduce that sizzle everywhere.
Butter on a sizzling plate is the house signature. It is also the reason a vegan cannot read this menu the way they would read most menus: a dish being made of vegetables tells you very little about how it arrives at the table.
The “Vegetarian Selections” Are Vegetarian, Not Vegan
Ruth’s Chris confirms in its FAQs that it offers a vegetarian menu, adding “please check with your local Ruth’s Chris for more details.” The allergen guide gives that menu its own section, and here is what it says.
Market Vegetable Linguini — flagged for gluten, dairy and wheat. This page previously called it “a purely vegan dish.” It is not.
Roasted Broccoli Steak — flagged for gluten, dairy and wheat. This page previously called it “100% vegan.” It is not.
Roasted Vegetable Napoleon — flagged for dairy.
Ruth’s Vegetarian Trio — flagged for gluten, dairy and wheat.
For the last two, the old advice was to ask for the cheese to be left off. The problem is that the guide does not break these dishes into components, so there is no way to tell from the published information whether the dairy flag comes only from a cheese you can remove or from butter cooked through the dish. That is the specific unknown, and it is the question to put to the kitchen: not “can I have it without cheese,” but “is there butter or cream anywhere in this dish, including how the vegetables are cooked.”
Sides And Vegetables
This is where the old version of this page went most wrong, so it is worth going through the guide line by line.
Cremini mushrooms are flagged for dairy — this page used to call them one of the tastiest vegan-friendly sides on the menu. Roasted Brussels sprouts, dairy. Creamed spinach, gluten, dairy and wheat, which the name gives away. Garlic mashed, dairy. Au gratin potatoes, gluten, dairy and wheat. The baked potato is flagged for dairy, with butter, cheese and sour cream listed under it as separate components. Sweet potato casserole is flagged for gluten, dairy, wheat, tree nut and egg — the old suggestion of asking for a butter-free and egg-free version of a baked casserole was never realistic and has been dropped.
Grilled asparagus is flagged for dairy, fish and egg, with hollandaise sauce listed beneath it carrying the same three. Removing the hollandaise is a sensible request, but the guide does not tell you whether the asparagus underneath was finished in butter, and given the pattern across the rest of this menu that is not a safe assumption. Unverified.
French fries carry a gluten flag and no wheat flag — consistent with a shared fryer rather than a coating — and, as above, Ruth’s Chris will not say what the oil is or whether the fryer is shared. So the fries are not flagged for dairy or egg, but the frying oil is the specific unknown and the company points you to the individual restaurant for it. This page used to call them “purely vegan.” That claim is gone.
The exception is Fresh Broccoli, marked regional, which is the only vegetable on the entire guide with a completely blank row — no dairy, no anything. That makes it the closest thing to a plant-based side here. It is still an allergen guide rather than a vegan certification, and “regional” means it is not on every menu.
Salads
The Steak House Salad is flagged for gluten and wheat — the croutons — and carries no dairy or egg flag. That is genuinely better than most of this menu, with one catch the guide states in its own heading: the salad section excludes dressings, which are listed separately. Among those, balsamic vinaigrette and plain vinaigrette carry no allergen flags at all; bleu cheese, creamy Caesar, ranch, remoulade and Thousand Island all carry dairy, fish or egg. Order the salad with a vinaigrette and ask about the croutons, which are the likeliest place for butter to hide.
The Fresh Mozzarella and Kumato Tomato Salad that this page used to discuss does not appear on the current guide at all, so it has been removed.
One dessert is worth knowing about for the same reason as the broccoli: raspberry sorbet is the only item in the dessert section with a blank allergen row.
Ruth’s Chris — The Story
Per the company’s own Our Story page, Ruth Fertel was a 38-year-old single mother of two boys when she mortgaged her house in 1965 to buy the 60-seat Chris Steak House in New Orleans, against the advice of her banker, lawyer, family and friends. A fire destroyed the restaurant in 1976 and her contract would not let her keep the original name, so she added her own: Ruth’s Chris Steak House. The first franchise opened that same year, 1976. The company now serves 21 countries, and its FAQs put the count at “over 140 locations worldwide.”
An earlier version of this article gave a $22,000 mortgage figure, a 1977 first franchise, and a split of “128 locations in the United States” and “150 restaurants worldwide.” None of those could be sourced to Ruth’s Chris, and the franchise date and the location count are contradicted by the company’s own pages, so they have been corrected or dropped.
Conclusion
Ruth’s Chris does something most restaurants in this guide do not: it publishes a real allergen grid and keeps it current. Used honestly, that grid says there is no vegan meal on this menu. The vegetarian section is vegetarian in the ovo-lacto sense, the vegetables are cooked with dairy, and the two blank rows — regional fresh broccoli and raspberry sorbet — do not add up to dinner.
If you are going because someone else chose the restaurant, the useful move is to call ahead, confirm whether the location is corporate or a franchise, and ask the kitchen directly whether anything can be cooked without butter. Ask about butter specifically. It is the ingredient this menu is built on.
