Montana Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Montana

Montana has 17 steakhouses across 11 towns in this directory, spread over a state of 147,040 square miles — which makes it slightly larger than Japan, with roughly one percent of Japan’s population. Missoula, Whitefish, Bozeman, Billings, Butte and Kalispell have two apiece. Everywhere else has one, and the drive between them is measured in hours.

There is not a single national chain steakhouse in the state. Not one. In the place with more cattle than people, the brands never came.

The Montana Ten

1. Lydia’s Supper Club (Butte) — open since 1946, and the last survivor of a vanished food culture. The story below is the best one in Montana and one of the best on this site.
2. Whitefish Lake Restaurant (Whitefish) — the long-running room out at the golf club, and the one people book when they are in the Flathead for something that matters.
3. Buchanan’s Chop House (Whitefish) — the sharper, newer option in town, and a genuinely serious chophouse for a ski town of 8,000.
4. Open Range (Bozeman) — Montana beef cooked with intent, on Main Street in the state’s fastest-changing town.
5. J.W. Heist Steakhouse (Bozeman) — the other side of Bozeman: dark, modern, built for the money that has arrived in the Gallatin Valley.
6. Carbon County Steakhouse (Red Lodge) — at the foot of the Beartooth Highway, and worth timing a drive around.
7. Mercantile Steak (Kalispell) — the Flathead Valley’s contemporary entry, in a restored downtown building.
8. 1889 Steakhouse (Missoula) — named for the year Montana became a state, which tells you the register it is going for.
9. Jake’s Downtown (Billings) — a fixture in the state’s largest city, and the default business dinner in eastern Montana.
10. Beef ’N Bone Steakhouse (Ulm) — population under a thousand, off I-15 south of Great Falls. Exactly the kind of room this directory exists to find.

The neighborhood that made Montana’s supper clubs was eaten by a copper mine

Butte was once one of the richest places on earth. The hill it sits on held so much copper that the city drew immigrants by the tens of thousands — Irish, Cornish, Serbian, Lebanese, Chinese and, on the eastern edge, Italian.

That Italian quarter was called Meaderville, founded in 1880. It had churches, a baseball field, an Italian social hall, and — this is the part that matters here — a strip of supper clubs famous well beyond Montana. People drove from other states to eat in them.

Lydia Micheletti started working in those supper clubs at the age of thirteen. She learned the room from Meaderville and the cooking from her Italian-immigrant mother, and in 1946 she opened her own place. Lydia’s Supper Club moved to its current building in 1964.

She moved because Meaderville was being destroyed. In 1955 the Anaconda Company broke ground on the Berkeley Pit, an open-pit copper mine, and over the next two decades the pit simply ate the neighborhood — along with East Butte, McQueen, Dublin Gulch and Finn Town. The homes went, the churches went, the baseball field went, the Italian social hall went. Meaderville vanished without a trace. Where it stood there is now a mile-long hole filled with contaminated water.

The supper clubs went with it. All of them but one. Lydia’s is the last Meaderville-style supper club left in Butte, still run by the family — Lydia handed it to her brother David, who ran it for 45 years until his death in 2009, and it passed to her great-niece and great-nephew, Toni Marquez and Nico Micheletti.

It is the only restaurant in this directory that is the sole surviving artifact of a neighborhood that no longer physically exists.

More cattle than people, and not one chain

As of January 2025 Montana held 2.16 million cattle against a human population of about 1.14 million — close to two head for every resident. The ratio gets absurd at county level: Petroleum County has 525 people and more than 32,000 cattle, about 62 cows per person.

And yet: zero national chain steakhouses. No Ruth’s Chris, no Fleming’s, no Morton’s, nothing. Montana shares that distinction with only a handful of states — South Dakota, Wyoming, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine and North Dakota — but it is the largest and most cattle-rich of them by a distance.

The reason is arithmetic. A chain steakhouse needs population density within a short drive. Montana has seven people per square mile. The brands never had a model that worked here, so the independents kept the whole state.

The closest thing to a chain is homegrown: The Montana Club runs five of the seventeen rooms on this page — Billings, Butte, Great Falls, Kalispell and Missoula. It is a Montana company serving Montana beef, which is a different proposition entirely, and why it sits here rather than at the bottom of the page.

The rest of the state

Beyond the Ten, Bow & Marrow serves Havre up on the Hi-Line near the Canadian border, and Winning Ridge Ale House covers Philipsburg, an old silver town of about 800 people in the Pintlers.

Browse the state by city: Bozeman, Billings, Missoula and Whitefish.