New Hampshire Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in New Hampshire

New Hampshire has 10 steakhouses across 9 towns, spread from Portsmouth on the coast up to Bretton Woods in the White Mountains. There is no national chain steakhouse anywhere in the state — a distinction it shares with Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Vermont, Maine and West Virginia. Every room below is independent.

One of them is in the hotel where the modern world economy was designed.

The New Hampshire Ten

1. Hanover Street Chophouse (Manchester) — the best steak in the state, and the room people drive up from Boston for.
2. Stickney’s (Bretton Woods) — inside the Mount Washington Hotel, where the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference created the IMF and the World Bank. More below.
3. Buckley’s Great Steaks (Merrimack) — a long-standing family-run room on the Daniel Webster Highway, and the state’s most consistent beef.
4. Library Restaurant (Portsmouth) — in the old Rockingham House, dining among floor-to-ceiling book-lined walls and carved mahogany.
5. Toscana Italian Chophouse (Portsmouth) — steak alongside handmade pasta, on Market Street.
6. The Woodshed (Moultonborough) — in a converted 1860s barn near Lake Winnipesaukee, and exactly as good as that sounds.
7. The Oak Room (New London) — at the New London Inn in the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region.
8. O Steaks & Seafood (Concord) — the capital’s entry, with a second room in Laconia on the lake.
9. Granite Steak & Grill (Rochester) — with a retail butcher counter attached, so you can take the same beef home.
10. O Steaks & Seafood, Laconia — the Winnipesaukee sibling, worth it in summer for the water alone.

Dinner at Bretton Woods

In July 1944, with the war still running, delegates from 44 nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Over three weeks they designed the postwar financial order — fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar, the dollar pegged to gold — and created the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank. John Maynard Keynes was in the room.

They chose the spot partly because it was remote, and partly because the hotel was large enough to hold everyone. It is a vast white Spanish Renaissance pile with a red roof, built in 1902, sitting under Mount Washington in the Presidential Range.

Stickney’s is the steakhouse in that building. You can eat a ribeye roughly where the gold standard was negotiated, which is a reasonable claim for a state with ten steakhouses and no chains.

Browse by city: Portsmouth and Manchester.