Minnesota Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Minnesota

Minnesota has 23 steakhouses across 13 towns in this directory, with Minneapolis holding 7 and the rest spread through St. Paul, the western suburbs and a handful of outstate towns. It is supper-club country — dark rooms, relish trays, tableside carving and a family name over the door — and it produced one of the most peculiar signature dishes in American steakhouse history.

The Minnesota Ten

1. Murray’s (Minneapolis) — open since August 5, 1946 and home of the Silver Butter Knife Steak, a 28-ounce strip sirloin for two carried out on a sizzling platter, sliced open at the table so you can approve the doneness, then carved in front of you. The story behind the name is below, and it is worth reading.
2. Manny’s Steakhouse (Minneapolis) — the city’s power steakhouse. Dry-aged, center-cut beef hand-trimmed by butchers and presented raw on a rolling meat cart before you order. The sides are famously absurd: the hash browns are built for five.
3. Mancini’s Char House (St. Paul) — charcoal-grilled steaks on West Seventh Street since 1948, still run by the Mancini family. Neon outside, live music inside, and the closest thing in the Twin Cities to an unchanged supper club.
4. Butcher & the Boar (Minneapolis) — founded by a Manny’s alumnus and built around house butchery, smoke and sausage as much as steak. The most distinctive cooking on this list.
5. P.S. Steak (Minneapolis) — occupies the Groveland Avenue mansion that was La Belle Vie, for years the pinnacle of Twin Cities fine dining. The room alone justifies the reservation.
6. Baldamar (Roseville) — the modern suburban benchmark, and the one locals name when they want to impress somebody without driving downtown.
7. The Butcher’s Tale (Minneapolis) — a newer North Loop room that leans on the butcher-shop framing its name promises.
8. Gianni’s Steakhouse (Wayzata) — the Lake Minnetonka standard for thirty years, clubby and unapologetic.
9. The Lake Room (Wayzata) — the newer, brighter counterweight to Gianni’s a few blocks away, with the water in view.
10. Number 4 Steakhouse (Mankato) — the best reason to eat steak in southern Minnesota, in a restored downtown building.

The steak critic who invented an award, and the dish named after it

Most signature steaks are named for a cut, a ranch or a founder. Murray’s named theirs after a prize handed out by a man who had appointed himself the world authority on steak.

Maurice Dreicer was a self-styled steak expert who traveled the world eating in restaurants and rating them, and who issued his own honor — the Silver Butter Knife Award — to the few kitchens he judged worthy. He did not give it away easily. A steak had to arrive on time, it had to be large, and it had to reach the table at exactly 120 degrees. The premise of the name was that a properly cooked, properly rested steak should not need a serrated blade at all: a butter knife ought to go through it.

In 1951 Dreicer gave the award to Murray’s, five years after it opened downtown. The restaurant did the sensible thing and named the steak after the award, and it has been on the menu ever since — a 28-ounce strip sirloin for two, delivered on a hot platter, opened at the table so the diners can approve the center, and carved where they can watch.

It is a small piece of history that explains a lot about Midwestern steakhouses generally: the theater is not decoration, it is the product. The same instinct runs through the meat cart at Manny’s and, a few hundred miles south, through the tableside service that Mancini’s has run since the Truman administration.

Nick Mancini mortgaged the family house to open a bar. Steak came eight years later.

In 1948, Nick Mancini came home to St. Paul from Army service in Japan, and he and his grandparents mortgaged the family home to open a tavern on West Seventh Street. It seated about fifty people, with a long bar and a small kitchen behind it, and it served the working end of the city.

There was no steak on the menu. His mother started putting out a little food, it worked, and steaks were not added until 1956 — eight years in. Nick then traveled to Italy and New York to learn how other people grilled, came back, and put everything over charcoal. That is still how it is done. He died in 2007, and the third and fourth generations of the family run Mancini’s today.

The Upper Midwest supper club is often written about as a style. It is more accurately a business model: a bar first, food second, family labor throughout, and a dining room that never needed to be redecorated because the regulars liked it the way it was. Minnesota and its neighbors around the old Chicago meat trade kept more of them than anywhere else in the country.

Around the state

The suburbs carry most of the volume. Pittsburgh Blue is a Minnesota group with rooms in Edina, Maple Grove and Rochester. Bloomington Chophouse and Twin City Grill cover Bloomington, Wildfire handles Eden Prairie, and Prime serves Blaine.

Outstate, Mystic Steakhouse and Perron’s Sul Lago are both in Prior Lake, and Prime Steakhouse is the lone entry way out in Morris, on the western prairie.

The national chains

Minnesota carries very little national presence — just Ruth’s Chris in Minneapolis and a second in Rochester. In a state with this many family-run rooms, that is not an accident.

Browse the state by city: Minneapolis, St. Paul and Wayzata.