Mississippi Steakhouses | SteakMap
The Best Steakhouses in Mississippi
Mississippi has 30 steakhouses in this directory and a map drawn by two forces almost nobody outside the state thinks about: the Gulf Coast casinos, and the oyster.
Five of the thirty dry-age their own beef and nine carry wagyu. The best of them would hold their own in a much larger city — one Ridgeland room ages a bone-in ribeye past forty days — and the most memorable is a converted small-town building in the hills that burns six hundred pounds of charcoal a week.
The SteakMap Ten: Mississippi's best, ranked
- Koestler Prime — Ridgeland. The longest dry-age in the state: a bone-in ribeye aged past 40 days. It also keeps a working sommelier and a Bordeaux and California list that would not look out of place in a city ten times Jackson's size. Closed Sundays.
- BR Prime — Biloxi. Inside the Beau Rivage, and the most complete beef program on the coast: an in-house butcher, prime carried in both wet- and dry-aged form, and a Kobe ribeye alongside stone crab and Gulf oysters. Reservations required, and there is a dress code.
- The Como Steakhouse — Como. The best story in Mississippi steak. Opened in 1988 by a former owner of The Butcher Shop in Memphis, it hand-cuts 27-day dry-aged beef and cooks it over open charcoal pits — burning through 500 to 600 pounds of charcoal a week. Memphis Magazine named its filet one of the top ten dishes of 2017. Como is a cotton town founded in the 1830s; the restaurant anchors its Main Street.
- Ely's Restaurant & Bar — Ridgeland. The second dry-aging kitchen in the Jackson suburbs, and the reason Ridgeland — not Jackson proper — is the state's real steak district.
- ForkLift — Tupelo. A neighborhood restaurant with a dry-aged ribeye and, tellingly, a dry-aged beef patty melt. Putting aged trim into a sandwich is what a kitchen does when it is breaking down its own beef rather than buying it portioned.
- Shapley's — Ridgeland. The long-running Jackson-area standard, and the room Koestler Prime is most often measured against.
- Mignon's Steaks & Seafood — Biloxi. Wagyu on the Gulf, with the seafood half taken as seriously as the beef.
- Field's Steak and Oyster Bar — Bay St Louis. The clearest expression of the Mississippi formula, and it is right there in the name.
- The Rack House Steak & Spirits — Gulfport. Wagyu and a serious bar, in the middle of the coast's densest stretch.
- Parrish's Restaurant & Lounge — Long Beach. Wagyu in a town of 15,000, which tells you something about how the coast eats.
The two national chains — Ruth's Chris and Morton's, both in Biloxi — sit below the ten by policy. Both are good; both are also everywhere.
In Mississippi, the steakhouse is also the oyster bar
Read the names in this directory and a pattern appears that exists in no other state we have covered. Field's Steak and Oyster Bar. Mignon's Steaks & Seafood. Brady's Steaks and Seafood. Scarlet's Steaks & Seafood. KC Steakhouse and Seafood. Even the Como Steakhouse trades under Como Steakhouse & Oyster Blues.
In most of the country a steakhouse adds seafood as a concession to the one person at the table who does not want beef. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast the two are equal partners, because the oysters are local and the beef is not. Ordering both is not a compromise here. It is the point.
If you are coming from out of state, this is the thing to plan around: order Gulf oysters first, then the steak, in the same room.
The casinos drew the map
Mississippi's steakhouses cluster in two places, and both are casino corridors.
The Gulf Coast — Biloxi, Gulfport, D'Iberville, Bay St Louis, Long Beach, Pascagoula, Ocean Springs — carries the largest concentration, anchored by the resort dining rooms. BR Prime at the Beau Rivage is the best of them.
Tunica Resorts, in the far northwest corner within reach of Memphis, is the second: Twain's and the Chicago Steakhouse both sit there.
Everything outside those two corridors is independent and local — the Ridgeland cluster near Jackson, the Tupelo restaurants, the Harveys rooms in Tupelo, Columbus and Starkville, and Sully's across Hattiesburg, Petal and Gulfport.
How deep Mississippi ages its beef
- Past 40 days — Koestler Prime, Ridgeland, on the bone-in ribeye. The deepest in the state.
- 27 days — The Como Steakhouse, hand-cut and finished over open charcoal.
Three more dry-age without publishing a number: BR Prime (which also runs wet-aged prime, the only kitchen in the state doing both), Ely's and ForkLift.
Browse every dry-aged steakhouse in Mississippi → · Browse wagyu in Mississippi →
Ridgeland and the Jackson metro
The capital's steak scene is not in Jackson. It is four miles north in Ridgeland, where Koestler Prime, Ely's, Shapley's and Tico's sit within a few minutes of each other — the densest concentration of good steak in Mississippi outside the coast.
