For the past 10 years, it’s been fashionable for every new owner of every new steak house in the city to make the following pre-opening claims:

My steak house will not look like a steak house.
My steak house will reinvent the American steak house experience.
My steak house will appeal to women.

Many terrific steak houses have opened in the past ten years, but I can’t think of one that lived up to its 21st–century promises.

Enter RPM Steak. The décor involves barely a smidge of tufted leather or gleaming wood. Waitstaff does not embark a 20-minute-long meat soliloquy. The menu offers significant selections of salads, seafood, and seasonal vegetables.

Yes, I ordered a 22-ounce Kansas City steak cut to nibble on in between my wedge salad and order of hen of the woods mushrooms as I luxuriated in a horseshoe-shaped booth in the bar. Hey, I'm still a red-blooded female Chicagoan.

RPM Steak, 66 W. Kinzie St., River North, 312-284-4990