Colorado Man Accused Of Doing The 'Most Karen Thing Ever' At A Texas Roadhouse
When Texas Roadhouse presented the 22-year-old Antonio Chacon with his birthday steak, it seemed small. Very small. Too small. He had ordered a 6-ounce steak and this definitely wasn't 6 ounces.
"My dad said 'go get that scale we just got,'" he told LadBible. He checked with the manager whether he could because, as he explained, "I would have felt disrespectful doing that if I hadn't." So, he rushed out and returned with the scale. Despite the waiter's assurances that the slab of meat would weigh somewhere between 4 to 5 ounces, Chacon's meat actually weighed 3.68 ounces. In response, the restaurant cooked a second steak for him and gave him a discount.
The internet, however, was not so sparing. "You actually took a scale to a restaurant?" one commenter asked. "If this isn't the most Karen thing I've ever seen then I don't know what is." Others pointed out that all meats shrink during cooking and joked that, if anything, it was Chacon's fault for ordering the steak well-done.
It was probably a small steak
While actually grabbing a scale to weigh one's meal is no doubt a Karen move, it seems safe to say that even with shrinkage, Chacon was served a smaller than average steak.
Writing for Weight Watchers, registered dietitian Leslie Fink says that meats will generally shrink by about 25% as they cook, so the final size will be about three-quarters of what it originally was. So for a 6-ounce steak, three-quarters would be 4.5 ounces, which could explain why the waiter assured Chacon that the steak would weigh between 4 and 5 ounces. Even with a fluctuation in the amount the steak shrinks, this particular slab was nearly a whole ounce smaller than one would expect. That would entail reaching an almost 50% reduction through cooking-related shrinkage. So, it seems probable that the original steak was actually smaller than 6 ounces.
Here, it is more fun to chock up the size to a practice described by Anthony Bourdain. Namely, well-done steaks are the backend steaks that restaurants are desperate to get rid of. Since well-done steaks are cooked beyond recognition, a host of defects can pass into one's mouth hidden from most people who order well-done steaks. Is that why Texas Roadhouse might have given Chacon a small steak? Who knows? At least Chacon was apparently better than the average person to eat well-done steaks because he noticed that something was different.