Podcast 339 – 31 Years of McKendrick’s Steak House, and What’s New on the Menu – Chef Branden Holte
McKendrick’s Steak House has been sitting across from Perimeter Mall in Dunwoody, Georgia since 1995, and the new executive chef Branden Holte started there in June 2026. He’s changed a good bit of the menu already, and he hasn’t touched the steaks at all.
In This Episode
- Branden Holte became executive chef at McKendrick’s Steak House in Dunwoody, Georgia in June 2026, brought in by operating partner Anthony Casiello.
- Claudia and Doug McKendrick opened McKendrick’s Steak House in 1995 at 4505 Ashford Dunwoody Road in the Park Place shopping center.
- McKendrick’s has won the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every year since 2003 and has been named one of Atlanta’s top five power bars.
- The steak program has not changed, still sourced from Meats by Linz using the Linz Heritage Angus line, with a new dry aged steak and a rotating steak of the day added on top.
- New menu items include a tuna tataki that replaced a dated tuna tartare, traditional cold seafood towers, and a rush hour bar menu served from 4:00 to 6:00.
What Makes McKendrick’s Steak House a Dunwoody Institution?
Some restaurants open, get talked about for a year, and disappear. McKendrick’s is the other kind.
Claudia and Doug McKendrick opened it in 1995, after they’d already spent decades in the Atlanta food scene. It sits at 4505 Ashford Dunwoody Road, in the Park Place shopping center, right across from Perimeter Mall. Same corner, same owners, thirty one years later.
The receipts are real. McKendrick’s has taken home the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every single year since 2003. Southern Seasons magazine named it one of the top five power bars in Atlanta. Zagat once described the service as “old-fashioned service that makes you feel special,” and the Atlanta Business Chronicle called the room “a comfortable relaxing environment that has a whisper of luxury.”
Here’s the number that says the most to me though. Many of the people working there have been working there for over a decade. In restaurants, that basically never happens.
That corner of Park Place has watched a lot of restaurants come and go. McKendrick’s just keeps showing up.
Who Is Chef Branden Holte?
Branden Holte is an Atlanta guy. He grew up in Gwinnett County. Outside of five or six years in Asheville, North Carolina, he’s been here his whole life.
His resume is a tour of places Atlanta people know. He worked at Local Three Kitchen & Bar. He spent five years as executive chef at Under the Cork Tree in The Prado over in Sandy Springs, and served as culinary director for that group, which put his hands on Hammocks Trading Company and the opening of Prime 120 in Woodstock. In Asheville he worked at Bull & Beggar, which is where he picked up the butchery and preservation habits that show up all over his McKendrick’s menu.
He also knows the building from the other side of the table. His mom used to bring him to McKendrick’s back when he was in culinary school, because it was close to her work and close to where he lived.
Operating partner Anthony Casiello brought him in this past June. The two had worked together before, so Casiello already knew what Holte could do in a steakhouse.
Did the Steaks Change at McKendrick’s?
No. That was the first thing I wanted to know, and the answer is no.
“The steak program has not changed at all,” Branden told me. “Same cuts, same purveyor.”
McKendrick’s still buys from Meats by Linz, and specifically the Linz Heritage Angus line, which the company breeds and controls itself from the farm all the way through its own dry aging room. If you’ve had a steak at McKendrick’s before, it’s the same steak.
What he did was add on top of it. There’s a dry aging program now, with one dry aged steak on the menu as a test run. If guests take to it, they’ll expand it.
There’s also a steak of the day, which changes based on what they bring in. They just finished a case of bone-in filets. Next up is an American Wagyu product that Casiello is into, cut as baseball steaks, which is a sirloin.
The philosophy is simple and I think it’s the whole story of this episode. Change the things people don’t order. Never change the thing they drive there for.
What’s New on the McKendrick’s Menu?
Branden says one of the first real changes was the tuna.
McKendrick’s had a tuna tartare and a separate seared tuna dish, so two cold tuna appetizers competing with each other. Branden was blunt about the tartare. It tasted fine, but it was dated. “That dish probably was made in 2005 and then rotated back on the menu several times,” he said. People could tell, and it wasn’t selling.
He combined both into one tuna tataki with wasabi mayonnaise, chili crisp, fried pickled red onions, sesame and shoyu. Seared and served cold. It’s now one of the best selling appetizers on the menu, and it’s cutting into his own calamari sales, which he says he’s not mad about.
The appetizer towers changed too. McKendrick’s was known for hot appetizer towers, and those have shifted toward traditional cold seafood towers instead. Think a big tray of ice with oysters, shrimp cocktail, colossal crab meat cocktail and fish pâté. You can still get an individual crab cake or a lobster tail broken into bites for the table. Large parties have taken to it.
Some things just got tuned rather than replaced. The Brussels sprouts were already good, but they weren’t always crispy. Now they’re always crispy.
What Happens to the Fish That Doesn’t Sell?
This is the part of the conversation I didn’t expect, but it is so important to how a restaurant operates.
Fresh fish is a waste problem. You buy it, you hope it sells, and what doesn’t sell gets thrown out. Branden learned a different approach at Bull & Beggar in Asheville, where preservation was a big part of the kitchen.
So here’s how McKendrick’s runs it now. Fish comes in, and they’ve got two or three days to sell it. If it hasn’t sold by the third night, they salt it to start a cure. Next morning they rinse the salt off, confit it, and turn it into fish dip or a tuna rillette. That means the fish spread changes every two or three days.
The trimming works the same way. Nice center cuts go out as entrees. The off cuts and tail pieces, the ones you don’t really want unless you like well done fish, get turned into the tuna salad on the lunch menu. They even make their own tuna mayonnaise from the preserved tuna, egg yolks, and the oil it was confit’d in.
Better food, almost no waste, protected food cost. Branden connected it straight back to the people: it’s how they make sure they can pay their employees well.
Nobody sitting at a table is going to notice any of that. That’s exactly why I think it matters.
What Is Rush Hour at McKendrick’s?
McKendrick’s doesn’t call it happy hour. They call it rush hour, and it runs at the bar starting at 4pm.
The kitchen serves the rush hour menu until around 6pm. That’s the window where you can get the burger, which you can’t order the rest of the evening. When I stopped in it was early and that bar was packed, which tracks with McKendrick’s being named one of Atlanta’s top five power bars.
The rush hour menu is also where Branden gets to experiment, because he can change it whenever he wants. He was putting on a new steak fry topped with bulgogi style steak, charred on the wood fired grill, then finished with kimchi, scallions and cilantro.
His attitude about it made me laugh. If it doesn’t sell for a week, fine, he eats bulgogi fries for a week and makes something else.
If you work anywhere around Perimeter Center and you’ve been looking for a spot after work, this is an easy one to put in the rotation.
Why Didn’t the Staff Leave When the Chef Changed?
Anybody who’s watched a restaurant go through changes knows the real risk isn’t the menu. It’s the staff.
Branden named it himself. “That’s what’s really scary for the regulars, is if half the staff leaves, then they’re like, mm, what’d you do?”
It didn’t happen. The core crew stayed through the whole transition, and he says there’s still a lot of familiar faces in the building and not much attrition. That lines up with what Discover Atlanta says about McKendrick’s, that many team members have been there over a decade.
Continuity is the actual product at a place like this. Branden knows a lot of the regulars by name, and he knows which day of the week he’s going to see them. Lunch is basically carried by a handful of people who come in almost every day. He described the feel as a very Cheers vibe, and having been in there, yeah, that’s it. Last time I was there, the bartender knew everyone (except me).
It also made his job easier. When you know your regulars by name, you can just ask them what they think about a new dish.
What Does a Steakhouse Say Yes To?
My favorite thing Branden said is about the unwritten rule of steakhouses.
“It’s the one style of restaurant where we’re not obligated to say yes, but we’re more likely than anybody else.”
Want chopped lobster and butter on your steak? It’s not on the menu. But the lobster is in the building, so the answer is yes.
The catch is what comes after. Say yes once and you’ve promised it forever, including on nights when Branden isn’t there. So the real work is making sure his sous chef can produce the exact same thing. Sometimes that means walking out to a table and explaining what they can actually do every single time, and what it’ll cost.
That balance, generous but repeatable, is the thing McKendrick’s has been doing since 1995. It’s also, weirdly, the same thing that makes anybody worth trusting in this town. Do what you said you’d do, the same way, over and over.
What’s Happening at Park Place in Dunwoody?
Park Place is finally waking up, and Branden has a front row seat to it. The whole center has gotten a much needed renovation.
Van Leeuwen just opened for ice cream, and it’s good. Simply South Pure Indian Vegetarian is going in as well. Ownership brought in a new security company and increased coverage in the parking lot, and there are crews out in the afternoons tearing old units apart and rebuilding them.
For anybody living in Dunwoody who wrote Park Place off a few years ago, it’s worth another look. That whole stretch along Ashford Dunwoody Road is a different place than it was.
Is McKendrick’s Open for Thanksgiving?
Yes, and there’s something new this year.
McKendrick’s always opens for Thanksgiving dinner service. Branden is also adding a pre-packaged takeout option, which he’s run at other restaurants enough times to have it down to a science. You pick it up on the Wednesday before with reheating instructions, and Thanksgiving is handled.
If you host, you already know how much that’s worth.
Connect with McKendrick’s Steak House
McKendrick’s Steak House is at 4505 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Atlanta, GA 30346, in the Park Place shopping center across from Perimeter Mall. You can reach them at 770-512-8888 or at mckendricks.com.
Lunch runs Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 2:30 pm. Rush hour at the bar starts at 4:00. They also have two private event rooms that handle groups from 8 to 50, which is useful to know for holiday parties.
Branden closed the episode by thanking Claudia and Doug McKendrick for bringing him on and believing in him and Anthony Casiello, which felt like the right note to end on.
If you’ve been to McKendrick’s before but not lately, go back. And if you’ve somehow never been, thirty one years of Dunwoody restaurants regulars can’t all be wrong.
What Is What’s Up Dunwoody?
What’s Up Dunwoody is a local media platform created by REALTOR® Matt Weber, focused on living in Dunwoody, moving to Dunwoody, and staying connected to the community. It began as a podcast and has grown into social media content, local guides, and two of the largest Dunwoody-focused Facebook groups where residents share recommendations and stay in the loop. Matt has expanded slightly outside of Dunwoody and now covers the entire top end of the Perimeter through his Top End ATL channels.
Matt is a Dunwoody REALTOR® who helps people navigate buying, selling, and moving in the area. Stay in the loop with local updates, listings, and insights by signing up here: whatsupdunwoody.com/email
Where is McKendrick’s Steak House in Dunwoody?
McKendrick’s Steak House is at 4505 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Atlanta, GA 30346. It sits in the Park Place shopping center directly across from Perimeter Mall. You can reach the restaurant at 770-512-8888.
How long has McKendrick’s Steak House been open?
Claudia and Doug McKendrick opened McKendrick’s Steak House in 1995, making it 31 years old in 2026. It has operated in the same Park Place location that entire time under the same ownership.
Who is the chef at McKendrick’s Steak House?
Branden Holte became executive chef at McKendrick’s Steak House in June 2026. He is an Atlanta native who previously worked at Local Three Kitchen & Bar, spent five years as executive chef at Under the Cork Tree in Sandy Springs, and trained in butchery and preservation at Bull & Beggar in Asheville, North Carolina.
Did McKendrick’s Steak House change its steaks?
No. The steak program at McKendrick’s has not changed. The restaurant still uses the same cuts and the same purveyor it has for many years. Meats by Linz, sourcing the Linz Heritage Angus line. A dry aged steak and a rotating steak of the day were added on top of the existing program.
What is new on the McKendrick’s menu?
The tuna tataki with wasabi mayonnaise, chili crisp, fried pickled red onions, sesame and shoyu, which replaced a dated tuna tartare and a separate seared tuna dish. Hot appetizer towers have shifted toward traditional cold seafood towers with oysters, shrimp cocktail and colossal crab meat cocktail. The Brussels sprouts are now made crispy every time.
What is rush hour at McKendrick’s Steak House?
Rush hour is what McKendrick’s calls its happy hour. The bar reopens at 4:00 and serves a dedicated rush hour menu until around 6:00, including a burger that is not available the rest of the evening.
Is McKendrick’s Steak House open for Thanksgiving?
Yes. McKendrick’s serves Thanksgiving dinner every year and is adding a pre-packaged takeout option for 2026. Takeout orders are picked up the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with reheating instructions included.
Does McKendrick’s Steak House have private dining?
Yes. McKendrick’s has two private event rooms that accommodate groups of 8 to 50 guests, which makes it a common choice for holiday parties and business dinners in the Perimeter Center area.