We're Calling B.S. On LongHorn Steakhouse's "Left-Handed Steak Knives"
Both my boyfriend and my best friend are left-handed, and through the years, I've noticed the small ways in which this fact makes life just one iota more difficult. When my best friend took hand-written notes in school, for example, her left hand bumped up against the notebooks' spirals, or smudged certain types of ink. But I've never noticed either of them to have a problem cutting steak. LongHorn Steakhouse, though, says the shape of traditional steak knives makes them difficult for left-handed people to use.
Is this even true?
In a press release announcing LongHorn's celebration of International Left-Handers Day on August 13, the steak chain boasts that three of its locations will that day "offer custom steak knives that meet the needs of left-handed carnivores." (Those locations are in Des Plaines, Illinois; St. Petersburg, Florida; and Millville, New Jersey.) Standard steak knives, it says, have the "serrated edge angled toward the right side of the knife's blade," forcing lefties "to cut with their non-dominant hand or sacrifice the quality of their bite by sawing through their steak with the dull edge of their knife."
I read this with one eyebrow raised, and of course immediately shouted for my boyfriend to weigh in.
"HEY. HEY. QUESTION FOR YOU," I scream from one room to the next. "DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM CUTTING STEAK BECAUSE YOU'RE LEFT-HANDED?"
My boyfriend peeks around the wall's corner with an equally confused expression.
"No," he says. "I use my right hand to hold the knife."
Left-handed readers, is this really something you're begging for? Special steak knives? (It seems to me that most lefties' true dining peeve is being seated too close to a wall on their left side so their elbow knocks into it while they eat.)
After some careful consideration, The Takeout has decided that this is based on faulty pseudoscience, and therefore, is bullshit. Does the texture of the steak really suffer if you're eating a piece of steak cut from the supposed "dull side"? The serration comes at the bottom of the knife, and therefore, both left- and right-handed users experience a uniform texture. And if this, in fact, is a problem, why not just flip the steak around?
In the end, we're guessing LongHorn Steakhouse probably turned a blind eye to logic, and may have—shocker!—done all this with the publicity in mind. The company may not have totally hit their target wth this International Left-Handers Day promotion, but we do give them credit for coming up with a promotion that totally got our humble food website to cover their restaurants. Bravo.