Kansas Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Kansas

Kansas has 11 steakhouses across 8 towns — Wichita holds three, and the rest are single rooms in places like Dodge City, Garden City, Hays and Mayetta. It is a thin roster for a state that feeds the country.

Because that is what Kansas does. It is one of the largest cattle-feeding and beef-packing states in America, and almost none of that beef gets eaten here.

The Kansas Nine

1. 6S Steakhouse (Wichita) — the best room in the state, and the one our readers single out. Wagyu ribeye is the order.
2. Chester’s Chophouse & Wine Bar (Wichita) — the long-standing special-occasion room, with the deepest wine list in Kansas.
3. Scotch & Sirloin (Wichita) — open for decades and unapologetically old-school, dark wood and a salad bar.
4. Prime on the Nine (Dodge City) — a proper steak in the most famous cowtown in America. More on that below.
5. Baron’s Steakhouse (Garden City) — in the heart of the feedlot country of southwest Kansas.
6. Hickok’s Steakhouse (Hays) — named for Wild Bill, who was sheriff here before he went north to Deadwood and got shot.
7. Six Mile Chop House (Lawrence) — the college-town option, west of KU.
8. Final Cut Steakhouse (Kansas City) — at Hollywood Casino on the Kansas side, and the metro’s big night out.
9. Three Fires Steakhouse (Mayetta) — at Prairie Band Casino on the Potawatomi reservation north of Topeka.

The state that feeds the country and barely eats it

Southwest Kansas is one of the densest concentrations of cattle feeding and beef packing on earth. The corridor running through Garden City, Dodge City and Liberal finishes and processes an enormous share of American beef — the plants there run shifts around the clock, and the feedlots hold hundreds of thousands of head at a time.

And yet the state supports eleven steakhouses. The beef does not stay. It is boxed and shipped east and west within days, to the rooms on every other page of this directory. Kansas is a processing state, not a dining one — which is exactly the inverse of Nevada, where the cattle never were and the steakhouses are everywhere.

Dodge City

There is no cowtown more famous. In the 1870s and 1880s the Santa Fe Railroad made Dodge City the shipping point for the Texas cattle drives — hundreds of thousands of longhorns walked north up the Western Trail, were loaded into cars here, and went east to the packing houses of Chicago and later Omaha.

Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday all worked or drank here during those years. The drives ended, the railheads moved, and Dodge City has about 27,000 people today — and one steakhouse on this list, Prime on the Nine. Worth stopping for, if only because of where you are standing.

The national chains

Two, both in the Kansas City suburbs: Sullivan’s in Leawood and J. Gilbert’s in Overland Park.

Browse by city: Wichita and Dodge City.