“A Steakhouse In Upstate” is a performance-talk based on two summers spent working as a server in fine dining and a bartender in an elite cocktail bar. Combining different registers of language—subjective-experiential knowledge and aesthetic theory, embodied dialogues to sociological texts on immaterial labor—I arrive at a new assessment of aesthetics in performance. The work is in two parts: “A Steakhouse In Upstate” and “The Hotel In Upstate.” A brief intermission separated the two parts, and the performance ran approximately 70 minutes in total. I present the talk alternating between modes of performed monologue and delivered speech. My text draws on theorists such as Arlie Russell Hochschild, Sianne Ngai, and Paolo Virno. In an age of increasing automation, “A Steakhouse In Upstate” proposes that there is a difference between “performing well” and “performance.”