Ruth’s Chris appeals 3-day suspension of beer sales

Beer will keep flowing this weekend at Ruth’s Chris Steak House Chattanooga.

That’s because the upscale restaurant near Hamilton Place shopping mall has appealed a three-day suspension it got on April 20 from the Chattanooga Beer Board after a waitress served one Michelob, each, to two underage male decoys during a March 19 sting operation.

The Chattanooga Beer Board voted 5-2 to suspend the restaurant’s beer sales from May 4 to May 7.

But the beer suspension is on hold, because the restaurant’s parent company, Sizzling Steak Concepts, hired attorney Johnny Houston, a motorcycle enthusiast who’s known as the “biker attorney” and also serves as Red Bank city judge. Houston filed an appeal Monday in Hamilton County Chancery Court.

Houston’s two-page petition says the beer board’s decision was “capricious, arbitrary, unlawful and without substantial and material evidence” and that it would cause the franchise steak house “irreparable harm.”

The matter will go for a full trial in Chancery Court at a date yet to be set.

Houston didn’t return calls seeking comment. Nancy Oswald, the co-owner and franchisee of Ruth’s Chris Steak House Chattanooga, didn’t say how the restaurant would make its case.

“We respectfully decline to comment until the appeal process has concluded,” she wrote in an email.

Sizzling Steak Concepts owns 12 Ruth’s Chris steak houses, with four restaurants in metro Atlanta and others in Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee, the company’s website says. Sizzling Steak Concepts also recently launched UP on the Roof, an original rooftop restaurant and bar in downtown Greenville, S.C.

The partners are husband-and-wife Markham and Nancy Oswald and brothers Jim Brooks and Phil Brooks. They were all close with Ruth Fertel, the Louisiana founder of the steak house chain, according to a 2012 article

in Franchise Times magazine. Fertel was forceful about standards, the article said, and Markham Oswald was quoted in the article as remembering Fertel shaking a finger in a company official’s face and saying, “Don’t forget, my name is over every door.”

Markham Oswald told the Chattanooga Beer Board that he was “devastated” by the sale to minors, that the waitress had been fired, that it was the first violation during his 41 years in the business and that Ruth’s Chris Steak House Chattanooga would now card 100 percent of its customers.

The beer board’s decisions are appealed in Chancery Court about six times a year, said Assistant City Attorney Keith Reisman.