 In mid-20th-century New York, there was a fad for tableside-flambéed dishes.By the 1940s, steak Diane was a common item on the menus of restaurants popular with New York café society, including the restaurants at the Drake and Sherry-Netherland hotels and The Colony, one of which may have originated it, as well as the 21 Club and Le Pavillon.It is often attributed to Beniamino Schiavon, 'Nino of the Drake', the maître d'hôtel of the Drake Hotel in New York City, who was said to have created the dish with Luigi Quaglino at the Plage Restaurant in Ostend, Belgium, and named it after a "beauty of the nineteen-twenties" or perhaps "a reigning lady of the European demimonde in the nineteen twenties".