While meatloaf can be hard to find on menus, it still offers comfort.

The Tap Room in Pebble Beach is a steakhouse of great repute, a signature feature of dining at The Lodge. One can order a massive prime beef Delmonico cut, weighing in at 22 ounces, a ribeye from Snake River Farms in Idaho, where they pasture-raise American Kobe, or a sample of the real deal – buttery Wagyu imported from Niigata, Japan.

Or one can order meatloaf.

That’s right, the homey American classic, treated with no pretense, right down to its ketchup glaze. On a menu where even the salt has names – Morada, Pico Blanco – meatloaf is listed proudly under the heading “Tap Room Specialties.”

“It holds its own next to Wagyu and prime cuts of steak,” says Shane Cassidy, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine. “It’s good to have some comfort.”

Tap Room’s meatloaf is satisfying – husky and rich, with a sweet tang from the glaze, yet surprisingly delicate. It comes dressed with a genteel mushroom gravy and plated alongside mashed potatoes and vegetables, all very fulfilling in a hit-the-spot kind of way.

Of course, Tap Room’s menu runs a course of humble (think potato skins) to refined, all well-prepared.

But Cassidy admits the addition of meatloaf is something of a risk. There is a strong tug of nostalgia to the dish, which makes it a bit daunting for a professional kitchen. To present it in a style that deviates from a childhood memory is to invite disappointment – and those childhood memories vary from guest to guest. For some, the best version is a blend of different ground meats. Others want it wrapped in bacon. There are people who cling to certain fillers, from shorn white bread pieces to oatmeal.

This potential for peril is evident in a story told to Cassidy when he took over the kitchen in 2021. It seems that a few years earlier, a chef from The Lodge’s banquet team ordered the meatloaf, took a bite and scoffed.

“He said, ‘My grandmother’s recipe is better,’” Cassidy notes. The culinary team at Pebble Beach held a blind tasting of the two versions. The grandmother’s is now on the menu – a decidedly simple creation involving bread crumbs soaked in milk, egg, Worcestershire sauce and Heinz ketchup, all items ready in a typical pantry.

“We could go more extravagant, but there’s no need to,” Cassidy points out. “When it’s overdone, it’s not as comfortable.”

In their cookbook A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes, Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer note the two tendencies of meatloaf presentation. While the dish became a staple at diners, they wrote, “it never made inroads like that into upscale restaurants, but every now and then, an ambitious chef will sneak it onto his or her menu, either presenting it in some exalted form or keeping it simple and serving it as an act of nostalgia.”

For Cassidy, the ketchup glaze brings the hominess. Yet it is also one of the biggest love-it-or-hate-it traps. Informal polls suggest a close to 50-50 split on the condiment. Southern Living refers to ketchup as a must, but there are plenty of no-ketchup recipes.

At Melville Tavern in Monterey, Chef Ernest Ruiz avoids the glaze, preferring to mix a little barbecue sauce into the loaf itself.

“People like it a lot,” he says.

His inspiration for adding meatloaf to the menu was just that “we had ground beef” and it would often end up as dinner for the staff. Melville Tavern now dedicates at least 40 pounds of ground beef a week for meatloaf.

Tap Room’s kitchen goes through even more – up to 100 pounds each week, according to Cassidy.

Loaves of chopped meat with some sort of filler date back centuries. Often these dishes were ways to use leftover scraps, at least according to Bruni and Steinhauer. The all-American meatloaf is more recent, with the earliest recipes appearing in the late 1800s.

That it became an American tradition is due to timing and circumstance. The Great Depression was followed by World War II. Meat went from a luxury many could no longer afford to an item subject to rationing. That breadcrumbs and other filler could extend a small amount of meat to feed a family had great appeal.

It is, as Cassidy says, familiarity and comfort, those mystic chords of memory on one plate. With that, he concludes, “You can’t go wrong.”