Watch How One of S.F.’s Most Legendary Restaurants Cooks Its Signature Slabs of Prime Rib

Tori Latham
·2 min read


True beef aficionados are well aware of San Francisco’s House of Prime Rib, which has been around since 1949. But not everyone may be familiar with the interesting way the iconic restaurant cooks its succulent hunks of meat.


For Eater’s Plateworthy video series, the host Nyesha Arrington visited the West Coast staple to get an inside look at its process. Alongside the owner Joe Betz and the chef Jose Rivera, Arrington goes through the steps of making the House of Prime Rib’s signature dish, from inspecting the meat to carving up the beef tableside. (The restaurant goes through an incredible 360 ribs every week, selling 1,200 orders every night.)


First, the raw meat goes into a dry-aging room—where infrared lights stop bacteria from growing—for a week (there are easily 300 ribs in the room at a time). From there, the meat is placed in a bath of rock salt, which Betz says keeps all the meat’s delicious juices inside. “You don’t want to see any meat,” he tells Arrington as she pours heaps of salt upon the ribs.


The tubs of salted meat are then sent into the oven (Betz would only say the temperature was “medium” not wanting to give away all the restaurant’s secrets), where they sit for about two and a half hours. After a drink at the bar, Arrington, Rivera, and Betz pull the meat out, let it sit for a couple of hours, and break open the salt with a wooden paddle. There’s very little cooking in the moment after someone orders, so “everything is prep work,” Betz says.

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Once the prime rib is ready to go, the fat is trimmed and the meat is sent out to the cart, where three ribs stand upright as they roam around the restaurant. “It’s a really amazing idea for the concept, because you take one thing, right? And you focus all the energy and the intention and you do it well and then you build around it,” Arrington says.


Tableside, the preparation is basically dinner and a show all in one. The prime rib is cut to the diner’s specifications, served alongside mashed potatoes and creamed spinach, in the pinnacle of a classic American meal. And despite serving an average of 600 diners on a weekday, “the attention to detail and flavor, it is not sacrificed,” Arrington says. “Everything is still with integrity and value for the guests.”


That may be reason enough—beyond the lovingly cared-for prime rib—to stop by the restaurant next time you find yourself in the Bay Area.

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