Takeout Night, Steakhouse Style: What Travels Best From Tartan
The Honest Problem With Steakhouse Takeout
Steakhouses are not designed for the road. The entire architecture of a great steakhouse experience — the cast iron still radiating heat when the plate arrives, the resting steak that gets carved tableside, the butter pooling in the hollow of a baked potato that came out of the oven four minutes ago — depends on immediacy. The gap between kitchen and mouth is measured in steps, not miles.
And yet the desire is real. There are nights when the couch is winning, when the occasion calls for something better than pizza delivery but the energy for a full restaurant outing is simply not there. Tartan understands this, which is why their takeout program was built not as an afterthought but as a considered answer to a genuine question: which parts of a great steakhouse meal survive the journey, and which ones should stay in the restaurant?
The answer, once you understand it, changes the way you order. Some of Tartan’s menu is built for the table and only the table — dishes whose greatness is inseparable from the conditions that produce it. Other items travel with surprising grace, arriving at your door still capable of delivering something close to the original experience. The skill is knowing which is which before you place the order.
What the Journey Does to Food
Before getting into specific dishes, it helps to understand the variables that operate between the moment food leaves a professional kitchen and the moment it arrives at your table at home. These variables are the reason takeout from a serious restaurant is a different exercise than takeout from a fast food operation designed around portability.
Steam: The Enemy of Texture
Hot food in a sealed container generates steam, and steam is the enemy of texture. Crispy things — fried items, seared surfaces, anything with a crust — absorb that steam and soften. A steak with a beautiful crust seared over high heat in a professional kitchen will have a noticeably softer exterior by the time it reaches you, because the sealed container has been slowly steaming it from inside. This is not a flaw in the packaging — it is physics, and no amount of vented container design fully solves it.
Temperature Drop: The Cooling Effect
Food cools faster in a takeout container than most people intuit, particularly proteins. A steak that leaves the kitchen at the right internal temperature for medium-rare will continue to cook slightly in the container from residual heat, then cool. By the time it arrives, it may be closer to medium than medium-rare, or it may be medium-rare in temperature but cool enough at the surface to have lost the sensory warmth that is part of the eating experience.
Structural Separation: The Collapse of Composition
Composed dishes — a salad with dressing, a plate with multiple components arranged in a specific way — travel poorly because the journey collapses the composition. The dressing migrates, the components mix, the visual and textural architecture of the dish flattens into something uniform. A dish designed around layered textures and arranged presentation becomes a container of ingredients that have been acquainted with each other in transit.
Sauce Behavior: How Sauces Change During Travel
Sauces separate, reduce by evaporation, or absorb into proteins during travel in ways that change the eating experience. A sauce meant to be spooned over a rested steak at the moment of service behaves differently when it has been sitting against the protein for twenty-five minutes. Sometimes it improves — the flavors meld and deepen. More often, the sauce has either absorbed entirely or pooled in the bottom of the container, and the ratio of sauce to protein is different from what was intended.
Understanding these four variables allows you to predict, before ordering, which Tartan dishes will land well at home and which ones will disappoint through no fault of the kitchen.
What Travels Exceptionally Well
Some of Tartan’s dishes are designed to withstand the rigors of delivery better than others. Here’s a closer look at the options that hold up remarkably well when taken home.
Bone-In Ribeye and Tomahawk: The Best Travelers
A large, expensive steak seems like the worst possible takeout candidate. In practice, the bone-in cuts are among the best travelers on Tartan’s menu, and the reason is thermal mass. A bone-in ribeye or tomahawk steak at thirty-plus ounces retains heat longer than any other item in the takeout container. The bone itself is a heat conductor and reservoir — it stays warm after the muscle has cooled, and that residual warmth keeps the surrounding meat at a serviceable temperature longer than a boneless cut of the same weight would manage.
Tartan’s Side Dishes: A True Revelation
The unexpected truth about steakhouse takeout is that the sides often travel better than the star of the plate — and at Tartan, the sides are good enough that this is not a consolation. Creamed spinach is among the best travelers on any steakhouse menu anywhere. It is already a warm, unified preparation without a crust to lose or a composition to collapse. The cream base insulates the spinach during transit, the flavors meld and deepen if anything, and reheating at home requires nothing more than two minutes in a saucepan. A well-made creamed spinach from Tartan arrives at your home essentially identical to how it left the kitchen.
Mac and Cheese, Roasted Potatoes, and Truffle Fries
Macaroni and cheese travels with the same graceful reliability. The pasta has already absorbed the sauce by the time it reaches you — unlike an al dente pasta that continues cooking in transit — and the cheese base holds temperature well. If there is a breadcrumb crust on top, it will have softened, but the dish’s primary pleasure is the richness of the cheese sauce against the tender pasta, and that survives the journey completely.
Roasted potatoes and potato preparations — wedges, hash, fondant-style preparations — hold up better than mashed potatoes, which tend to stiffen and separate in transit. Roasted potato preparations have enough structural integrity to maintain their character, and the natural starch acts as insulation that keeps the interior warm longer than you would expect.
Truffle fries are the one fried item worth ordering for takeout if you have an oven at home and ten minutes. They will soften in transit — this is guaranteed — but spread on a baking sheet in a 425-degree oven for eight minutes, they recover almost entirely.
Tartan’s Sauces and Compound Butters
Tartan’s sauce program is one of the kitchen’s quiet strengths, and sauces are ideal takeout items because they have nothing to lose in transit and several things to gain. A properly reduced red wine sauce, a classic béarnaise sent in a separate container, a peppercorn cream — these all travel well, reheat easily, and in some cases taste better after twenty minutes of resting, because the flavors have had time to continue developing. The compound butters — herb, bone marrow, blue cheese — are particularly good takeout additions. A disc of bone marrow compound butter placed on a resting steak at home, allowed to melt slowly over the meat for three minutes before you cut in, produces a result that approximates what the restaurant does tableside more closely than almost any other home technique.
What Travels Acceptably With Effort
Some cuts, like the New York Strip, require more active management once they arrive at home.
The New York Strip
The strip is a more complicated takeout subject than the ribeye. It has less fat marbling, which means it retains heat less effectively and cools more linearly during transit. The textural quality of a strip — firmer than a ribeye, with a defined grain that responds distinctly to cutting direction — also changes more noticeably as it cools, becoming tighter and chewier in a way that the fat-rich ribeye does not.
Resting it out of the container for five minutes before reheating briefly in a hot pan can help recover much of what the journey cost.
The Filet Mignon
The filet is the cut most dependent on conditions the takeout format cannot preserve. Its value proposition is textural — the extraordinary tenderness that makes it the preferred cut for people who prioritize the sensation of the meat over its depth of flavor. This tenderness is less perceptible when the filet has cooled slightly and spent time in a container. The filet will still be good but not great when delivered — it requires extra sauce and a bit more care.
The Porterhouse
The porterhouse occupies middle ground because it is two cuts in one. The strip side has all the characteristics described above — it travels acceptably with the home finishing step. The filet side has all the tenderness concerns, amplified by the fact that the filet sits closer to the bone and cools faster than the strip portion.
For takeout purposes, the porterhouse is worth ordering if you are feeding multiple people and want variety on the table. The strip portion will hold up well; plan to prioritize it first and move to the filet quickly. If it is just one or two people, the ribeye delivers a more consistent experience from first bite to last.
What Should Stay in the Restaurant
Anything With a Critical Crust or Sear
Tartan’s kitchen achieves sear temperatures that a home stove cannot replicate — commercial burners and cast iron heated to conditions that produce a Maillard reaction crust in seconds rather than minutes. That crust, when it leaves the kitchen, begins to soften immediately. By the time it reaches your door, it is a memory of itself rather than the thing it was.
This is not a reason to avoid steakhouse takeout entirely — it is a reason to set your expectations correctly and use the home finishing techniques described in the next section rather than expecting the crust to survive intact.
Composed Salads
Tartan’s composed salads are built on fresh ingredients, carefully dressed, and arranged with attention to the visual and textural contrast between their components. None of that survives a twenty-minute journey in a sealed container. The dressing migrates into the greens, the greens wilt from the moisture, and the textural hierarchy of the dish — the contrast between crisp elements and tender ones, between dressed components and undressed garnishes — collapses uniformly.
If you want a salad alongside a Tartan takeout meal, the better approach is to build one at home from whatever is in the refrigerator. The kitchen’s talent should be directed toward the proteins and hot preparations, where it actually travels.
Shellfish Preparations
Raw or lightly prepared shellfish — oysters, shrimp cocktail, anything served chilled — require the temperature control of a restaurant kitchen and a very short time between preparation and consumption. These are not takeout items from any establishment, and they are not takeout items from Tartan. The food safety considerations alone argue against it, but beyond safety, the quality argument is equally decisive: a cold preparation served properly at the table and the same preparation twenty-five minutes into a car journey are not the same dish.
The Home Finishing Kitchen: Making Takeout Taste Like the Restaurant
The single most effective thing you can do to improve a steakhouse takeout experience is treat the food as partially cooked rather than fully finished when it arrives. Professional restaurant kitchens apply this logic constantly — proteins are brought to a certain point, rested, finished with butter, and plated at the last moment. The home kitchen can replicate the finishing steps even when it cannot replicate the initial cooking conditions.
For the steak: Remove it from the container immediately upon arrival and let it rest on a cutting board, uncovered, for five minutes. This stops the carry-over cooking and lets the surface moisture evaporate slightly. Then, if the steak has cooled more than you would like, place it in a cast iron pan over high heat with a tablespoon of butter for thirty seconds per side — just long enough to reheat the surface and introduce a small amount of fresh sear character. Do not cook it further; you are finishing, not cooking.
For the truffle fries: Spread them on a baking sheet in a single layer — no stacking — and place them in a preheated 425-degree oven for eight minutes. They will crisp. This works because the fries were cooked correctly at the restaurant; the oven is simply removing the steam that softened them in transit, not cooking them from raw.
For creamed spinach and macaroni and cheese: Transfer to a saucepan over medium-low heat. Add a tablespoon of cream or butter if the preparation has thickened during transit. Stir gently until warmed through. Do not microwave — the uneven heat of a microwave creates hot spots in dairy-based preparations and changes the texture of the sauce in ways that stovetop reheating does not.
For the sauces and compound butters: Warm the sauces gently in a small saucepan. Place the compound butter on the rested steak immediately after the finishing sear step and allow it to melt over the surface for two to three minutes before cutting. The butter will pool slightly around the base of the steak and create a self-basting environment in the final minutes before service. This is the closest home approximation of the tableside finishing that Tartan’s kitchen applies at service.
Setting the Table at Home
There is one more element of a great steakhouse takeout experience that has nothing to do with the food: the table you set it on.
Tartan’s dining room creates a specific atmosphere — the low light, the sound of the room, the weight of the glassware, the surface of a properly set table. None of that comes in the bag. But the degree to which you reconstruct it at home affects how the food tastes in a way that is measurable and real. Eating from the container on the couch and eating from a properly set table with actual plates, a poured glass of wine or beer, and adequate lighting are different experiences even when the food is identical.
This is not pretension. It is the psychology of eating, and it applies to takeout from a serious restaurant more than to any other delivery format. The food from Tartan deserves a plate. The steak deserves a proper knife. The sides deserve serving dishes rather than takeout containers.
Ten minutes of table-setting before the food arrives produces a meal that is twenty percent better than the same food eaten in the same containers it was delivered in. That is not an estimate. It is what the experience of eating actually is — the sum of everything surrounding the food, not just the food itself.
The Bottom Line on Tartan Takeout
The best Tartan takeout order for a single person or a couple builds around the ribeye or tomahawk as the anchor, adds creamed spinach and one potato preparation as the sides, includes at least one sauce or compound butter as a finishing element, and uses the home kitchen as the last step rather than treating arrival as the end of the cooking process.
For larger groups, the sides become the story: order generously across the side menu, treat the proteins as the complement rather than the centerpiece, and use the table as the destination — a proper spread of steakhouse sides with a bone-in cut at the center of the table travels better than any individual plate and creates the communal experience that the format was designed to support.
The restaurant is always the better experience for the food that demands it. But on the nights when the table is at home, Tartan gives you enough to work with that the meal can still be something worth looking forward to — provided you know what to order, what to do when it arrives, and what to expect from the journey.
About Tartan of Redlands
Tartan of Redlands, a cherished local gem since its inception on April 15, 1964, is well-known for serving classic steakhouse dishes in a friendly, community-focused setting. Originally founded by the Ctoteau brothers—Velmer, Al, and Art—the restaurant was created with a simple goal: to offer flavorful meals and outstanding service.
Over time, ownership of Tartan has changed hands, but the fundamental principles have remained constant. Larry Westin joined the Ctoteau family in running the restaurant and played a key role for many years. After his passing in 2003, Larry Westin Jr. carried on the family tradition until 2015, when Jeff and Lisa Salamon took over as the current owners.
Jeff Salamon, a Marine Corps veteran from Boston, continues the restaurant’s legacy by prioritizing values such as loyalty, tradition, and fostering a strong community spirit.
The menu showcases beloved steakhouse staples, including the well-known Saturday prime rib, top-tier steaks, and the signature Redlands Tartan Burger. The full bar adds to the experience, enhancing the overall charm of the restaurant.
Often referred to as the “Cheers of Redlands,” Tartan is beloved for its relaxed vibe, attentive service, and loyal customer base. Offering both indoor and outdoor seating, it remains a go-to spot for locals throughout the year.
