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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT NOVEMBER 24, 2022
YOUROBSERVER.COM
TURKEY SPICED AND STUFFED TWICE Thanks to an assist from the Food Network, the Alpine Steakhouse is famous for its turducken. SPENCER FORDIN A+E EDITOR
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ou don’t have to call Matt Rebhan to tell him he’s on TV again. His cash register is already ringing off the hook. Rebhan, the proprietor of Alpine Steakhouse on U.S. 41 in Sarasota, is currently working through his busiest season of the year thanks to a brush with culinary celebrity that occurred more than a decade ago. Rebhan and his restaurant’s signature dish, the turducken, were featured on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” hosted by Guy Fieri in 2007, and the resulting notoriety helped fuel the eatery’s growth into a national footprint. Today, 15 years later, Rebhan says the program is still paying dividends. “They play it year after year. And you can tell,” he says. “If the show starts at 8:30 at night, I’ll be answering calls until midnight. We have an app on the phone that shows us emails of all the orders coming through and it will just be like, ‘Ding ding ding ding ding.’ “Then we come in the next day and we start boxing them up and shipping them out.” Rebhan is a third-generation restaurateur, and the steakhouse and meat market he runs was opened up by his grandfather, Henry Rebhan, in 1975. Mark Rebhan, Henry’s son and Matt’s dad, ran Alpine for decades, and he brought the turducken — which is a deboned turkey with a deboned duck and chicken cooked inside of it — here to Sarasota. The dish originated in New Orleans and rose to national consciousness in SEE TURDUCKEN, PAGE 2
Illustration by José Valle
Why eat a plain old turkey when you could eat a turkey with a duck and a chicken cooked inside of it?