Delaware Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Delaware

Delaware has seven steakhouses across three towns — Wilmington holds five, with one in Dover and one at Rehoboth Beach. It is the second-smallest state in the country and you can cross it in under two hours, which makes the list below effectively a single city guide with two outliers.

It also has one steakhouse doing considerably more than the state’s size would predict.

All seven

1. Bardea Steak (Wilmington) — from James Beard semifinalist chef Antimo DiMeo (nominated in both 2022 and 2025), the team behind Bardea Food & Drink. Beef is the centre of it, but the menu also runs to elk, bison, kangaroo and beef heart, which is not a sentence you write about many steakhouses. It has been ranked among the top 50 steakhouses in North America.
2. Walter’s Steakhouse (Wilmington) — the old-guard room, dark wood and a long bar, and the one locals name when they want the classic version.
3. Tonic Seafood & Steak (Wilmington) — on Market Street downtown, and the most flexible of the city’s options.
4. Valle Cucina (Wilmington) — the Italian-American chophouse angle, steak alongside handmade pasta.
5. 1776 Steakhouse (Rehoboth Beach) — the beach-season steak dinner, named for the year and worth booking ahead in summer.
6. Royal Prime Steakhouse (Dover) — the capital’s entry, and the only serious steak in central Delaware.
7. Sullivan’s (Wilmington) — the only national chain steakhouse in the state.

A James Beard kitchen in a state of a million people

Delaware is not where you would expect to find one of the more ambitious steakhouses on the east coast. It has fewer than a million residents, no city over 75,000, and sits in the shadow of Philadelphia forty minutes north.

Bardea Steak is on Market Street in downtown Wilmington, from the group behind Bardea Food & Drink, whose chef Antimo DiMeo has twice been a James Beard semifinalist. The steak list is the point, but the kitchen keeps going past it — elk, bison, kangaroo, beef heart — which is the sort of thing a confident kitchen does and a timid one does not.

It is the clearest example in this directory of a serious steakhouse existing because of a particular chef rather than a particular market.

Browse by city: Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach.