AJ O'Leary

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There’s Something About This Outback Steakhouse

Why must it be like that? Why must the Outback font be black?

"And you may say to yourself, 'well, how did I get here?'"

— Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)

In life, as in sports video games, we value routine and predictability. Our brains are wired to seek patterns in things. Once those patterns are identified, our brains like to see said patterns play out in a reliable manner over and over again in the wild.

Every now and again, something comes along to disrupt that history of dependability. That disruption could be as simple as paradise being paved for a parking lot. It could be as abstract as an underdog finally coming out on top.

In certain cases, this disruption to your routine can come in the form of a chain restaurant.

Take the classic, red Outback Steakhouse logo.

It's probably what you would think of if I said Outback Steakhouse to you — or, at least, it’s what you would think of after Bloomin’ Onions and the guy from Crocodile Dundee.

It’s approachable and evokes a feeling of familiarity and sense of belonging, like your grandmother’s cooking or the knowledge that you and your loved ones can enjoy a “flame roasted” steak at a reasonable price.

What if I told you there’s an Outback Steakhouse out there that looks like this?

What’s your initial reaction to the photo above? Do you sense dread? Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, something doesn’t add up here, or maybe even I didn’t know this many words could be written about an Outback Steakhouse location.

Whatever your thoughts may be, this is a real Outback, located near an outlet mall on the southern edge of Las Vegas, Nevada. Its logo evidently differs from that of every other Outback Steakhouse in the Las Vegas Valley, including one with prime placement on the Las Vegas Strip a few miles up the road.

Even stranger, there’s no reference to this logo on Outback’s corporate website. A cursory Google search brings up a number of Outback locations with the same font, yet all feature the rocky motif recalling the Australian desert. My local Outback Steakhouse doesn’t have the motif. Where the hell is the motif?

Because I have nothing better to do in my life than watch the world burn and ponder the oddities of America’s foremost casual steakhouse chain, I dug a little deeper and checked on another recently-opened Outback in my hometown. Here we’ve got the same font that’s bugging me and everyone I know out, but it’s red…and the motif is there.

Being the intrepid part-time investigator that I am, I decided to go ahead and Google “outback black font”. Should shed some more light on this terrifying reality of ours, right?

Turns out that as of this writing, that Google query will deliver you exactly one relevant result: a forum thread on one of my favorite oddball websites and hot spots for impassioned arguments that make you question existence, Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos, where anecdotal reports of a similarly jarring Outback logo in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Katy, Texas, all cities that happen to be both delightfully random and very, very far away from my local clandestine Outback, are trickling in. There’s one picture helpfully provided by a contributor who points out that the font used is, evidently, “Hattenschweiler” and not “Impact”, though this logo still features the motif missing from my area oddity. Sorry, Mario, but our Outback is in another mid-sized, chain-filled American metropolis.

End of the Line

Defeated, dejected, and no more educated about Alien Outback than I’d been before I set out on this fact-finding mission, I wrapped up my journey at the place where facts go to die: Facebook.

The group in question: Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Signage, a group that serves the exact purpose its name indicates. If I can’t figure out why the fuck there’s an Outback in my city with a logo suitable for a black ops government contractor, how successful can it be?

I went ahead and submitted a photo to see if I could garner any insight. Look below for a sampling of the USDA Certified Prime insight I craved going into this excursion:

In Conclusion

You know those dystopian novels where a bunch of monolithic structures appear in several city centers for no reason and everyone freaks out and chaos reigns and birds attack humans or something? That’s essentially how I feel looking at this Outback. It sits there, taunting me with its secrets every time I pass it. Neener neener, it says to me in a hilariously fake Australian accent. You’ll never unlock the secrets of the Clandestine Outback and I will drive you right off Uluru and into eternal madness.

If you have any idea what the hell is going on — in general, I guess, but especially in matters concerning the clandestine Outback font — please let me know. No matter what happens, though, or what you and I may or may not know about the secrets of the Outback, life will still be there tomorrow.

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