Stuart Anderson

Stuart Anderson (November 27, 1922 – June 6, 2016) was an American restaurateur and founder of the Black Angus Steakhouse restaurant chain, first established in Seattle in 1964. Early life Anderson was born in Tacoma, Washington, and raised in Seattle in well-to-do circumstances. His father was a successful orthopedic surgeon during the Great Depression. Anderson would joke that his difficult circumstances included having to walk all the way across the Broadmoor golf course to school. He left Seattle to join the United States Army during World War II, driving tanks in General George S. Patton's Third Army, and returned to Seattle in 1949. Career In Seattle after the war, Anderson bought a hotel, The Caledonia, in order to circumvent the state's blue laws and sell alcohol in the hotel bar which he called the Ringside Room. Anderson would later say in his book Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef that "Hookers, seamen, hustlers and wrestlers made up most of my trade." Around 1960, he opened a restaurant there and called it The French Quarter. In 1962, it was remade with a Klondike Gold Rush theme for the 1962 World's Fair and renamed to The Gold Coast. Finally in 1964 it was renamed again to Stuart Anderson's Black Angus before moving to Seattle's Elliott Avenue in the Denny Triangle. Eventually Black Angus became a chain with over 100 restaurants which Anderson sold in 1972.