Iowa Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Iowa

Iowa has 17 steakhouses across 13 towns in this directory, which makes it one of the smallest rosters on the site. It is also the state most responsible for what the rest of the country eats. Iowa corn feeds the cattle, Iowa packinghouses taught people to cut them, and steakhouses a thousand miles away still buy here on purpose — the Knoxville, Tennessee institution Ye Olde Steak House has been specifying Iowa grain-fed beef since 1968.

Two of the rooms below are genuinely unlike anything else in this directory.

The Iowa Ten

1. Archie’s Waeside (Le Mars) — a James Beard America’s Classic that the Foundation called “a citadel of American beef cookery.” Twelve cuts of dry-aged beef, porterhouses aged four weeks in-house, in a town of 10,000. The story is below and it is extraordinary.
2. Rube’s Steakhouse (Montour) — you cook your own steak. You pick the cut, you carry it to a shared indoor charcoal grill, and you stand there and cook it. Open since 1973 and very likely the original grill-your-own steakhouse in America. A second room in Waukee does the same.
3. 801 Chophouse (Des Moines) — the capital’s serious steakhouse and the most polished dining room in the state.
4. Prime and Providence (West Des Moines) — the suburban counterweight to 801, and the one locals tend to name first.
5. Irina’s Steak & Seafood (West Des Moines) — independent, idiosyncratic, and the least chain-like room in the metro.
6. Kingston’s Steakhouse (Cedar Rapids) — the anchor of Iowa’s second city.
7. Midtown Reserve (Cedar Rapids) — the newer, sharper option a few minutes away.
8. Joseph’s Steakhouse (Iowa City) — downtown, near the university, and the default for a good night out in Johnson County.
9. 360 Steakhouse (Council Bluffs) — on the Nebraska line across from Omaha, and the best steak on the Iowa side of the river.
10. 1015 Steak Company (Sibley) — population 2,700, up in the far northwest corner, and exactly the sort of room this directory exists to find.

He fled the Bolsheviks and learned beef in the Chicago packinghouses

Archie Jackson escaped Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. He came to the American Midwest, and he learned a trade the hard way: cutting and dry-aging beef in the packinghouses of Sioux City in the 1930s and then in Chicago in the 1940s, in the same stockyard economy that was still the largest meat operation on earth.

In 1949 he took what he had learned to Le Mars, Iowa — a town of about ten thousand people in the far northwest of the state — and opened Archie’s Waeside. He kept doing the packinghouse part himself. The restaurant still does.

Today the menu runs twelve cuts of dry-aged beef, sourced from farms in northwest Iowa and northeast Nebraska, with the porterhouse dry-aged in-house for four weeks. It has been in the family for three generations: Archie’s daughter Valerie Rand ran it from 1973 to 1994, and her son Bob Rand has run it since.

In 2015 the James Beard Foundation named it an America’s Classic and described it as “a citadel of American beef cookery.” That is a serious phrase to attach to a restaurant in a town best known for making ice cream, and it is accurate. If you only eat at one steakhouse in Iowa, this is not a close decision.

At Rube’s, you cook it yourself

In 1973, Glen “Rube” Rubenbauer opened a steakhouse in Montour — population a few hundred — built on a premise most restaurants would consider a liability: the customer does the cooking.

You choose your cut from the case. You carry it to a communal indoor charcoal grill, and you cook it. The grills are shared rather than built into the tables, so dinner involves standing around a fire with strangers, which turns out to be the entire appeal. Rube’s is very likely the original grill-your-own steakhouse in the United States, and people have driven across several states to do it since word got out in the 1970s.

The beef is Iowa corn-fed black Angus, raised through a partnership with Iowa Premium on family farms within 150 miles of the grill you are standing at. A second location in Waukee brings the format closer to Des Moines, but Montour is the real one.

Around the state

Beyond the Ten, Wissota Chophouse covers Ottumwa, Angelini’s brings an Italian-American chophouse angle to Keokuk down on the Mississippi, and Prime Time serves Hinton out near Sioux City. Montana Mike’s handles Newton.

The national chains

Two, and both are in the same suburb: Ruth’s Chris and Fleming’s in West Des Moines. In the state that grows the feed for most of the country’s beef, the national brands have barely bothered — which tells you how well the independents hold the ground here.

Browse the state by city: Des Moines, West Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.