Oregon Steakhouses | SteakMap
The Best Steakhouses in Oregon
Oregon is a small state in this directory and a strange one: 26 steakhouses across 14 towns, with Portland holding 8, Bend 4 and Pendleton 3. What makes it worth reading is that those three places have almost nothing to do with each other. The Cascade Range splits Oregon into a wet, green, chef-driven west and a high-desert cattle country east, and the steakhouses on either side are not the same animal.
The Oregon Ten
- RingSide Steakhouse (Portland) — open since 1944 and still the best steakhouse in the state. Wine Spectator has given it a Best of Award of Excellence every year since 2001. Order the onion rings first: James Beard, who was born in Portland, called them the best he had ever eaten.
- Bos Taurus (Bend) — named for the scientific name of domestic cattle, which tells you how seriously it takes itself. Dry-aged beef from ranches around the country, plus Miyazaki A5 and certified Kobe — a distinction only a handful of American restaurants hold, and the same one carried by SW Steakhouse in Las Vegas.
- Hamley Steakhouse & Saloon (Pendleton) — a steakhouse attached to a saddle shop that has been making saddles since 1883. More on this below. The adjoining Slickfork Saloon has a mahogany bar worth the drive on its own.
- Urban Farmer (Portland) — the Pacific Northwest argument about beef, made on the eighth floor of The Nines: grass-fed Oregon beef and pasture-raised cuts against a 350-bottle list and Oregon spirits behind the bar.
- Sayler’s Old Country Kitchen (Portland) — an eastside institution since 1946, and the home of the oldest 72-ounce steak challenge in America. See below.
- El Gaucho (Portland) — tableside carving, flambe carts and a dining room that has not apologized for anything since the 1950s. A small Pacific Northwest group rather than a national one.
- Wilf’s (Portland) — steaks and live jazz inside Union Station, which is to say inside a working nineteenth-century railway terminal. There is nowhere else in Oregon like it.
- Tumalo Feed Company (Tumalo) — an Old West steakhouse in a hamlet north of Bend, and the clearest example on this list of what an eastern Oregon steak dinner looks like.
- Rancher Butcher Chef (Bend) — the whole supply chain in the name, which is the point: the beef is traced from ranch to block to plate.
- Jake’s Grill (Portland) — the downtown standby, dark wood and white tablecloths, where Portland has eaten steak between meetings for generations.
The 72-ounce steak challenge was invented in Portland, not Texas
The four-and-a-half-pound steak eaten against a one-hour clock is the most recognizable gimmick in American steakhouse history, and almost everyone assumes it came out of the Texas panhandle. The Big Texan in Amarillo made it famous. It did not invent it.
Sayler’s Old Country Kitchen opened on the east side of Portland in 1946 and has run its 72-ounce challenge since 1948 — twelve years before the Big Texan opened its doors in Amarillo in 1960.
The rules have barely moved since. You eat every edible part of the steak inside an hour, and the steak is not the hard part: it comes with two celery sticks, two carrot sticks, two olives, two dill pickles, a salad, ten french fries or a baked potato, and a slice of bread. Finish it and the meal is free. As of August 2025, in seventy-seven years, 714 people had managed it.
It is a useful corrective to the usual story. Oregon is not a state anyone associates with beef theater, and the biggest beef theater in the country started here — while Texas, which does the thing better than anybody, got there later.
East of the Cascades, the steakhouse is attached to a saddle shop
Pendleton has roughly 17,000 people and three steakhouses in this directory, which makes no sense until you understand what Pendleton is. It is a cattle town, and it has been the home of the Pendleton Round-Up — one of the oldest and largest rodeos in the world — since 1910.
Hamley Steakhouse & Saloon sits next door to Hamley & Co., a saddlery founded by J.J. and Henry Hamley in 1883, whose family had been leatherworkers in Cornwall, England before they crossed the Atlantic. Hamley settled permanently in Pendleton in 1905 and has operated out of the same building ever since, building a reputation across the West as the maker of the finest saddles a man could ride. It has produced hundreds of Round-Up trophy saddles, and 58 world champions have ridden Hamley saddles. J.J. Hamley helped organize the first Round-Up and served as a director for years.
The steakhouse itself is recent — the concept started in 2006 and opened in June 2007 — but it is the only steakhouse in this directory whose neighbor has been outfitting working cowboys for over a century. The rest of eastern Oregon runs on the same logic: Cowboys Bar & Grill on the Idaho line, Virgil’s at Cimmiyotti’s and the Flying X in Pendleton itself, and The Main Place out in Halfway, a town of a few hundred people in the far northeast corner of the state.
The rest of the state
Bend is the fastest-growing steak town in Oregon, with The Blacksmith and Brickhouse alongside Bos Taurus and Rancher Butcher Chef, plus a second Brickhouse in Redmond. In the Willamette Valley and the suburbs, Jewel Box Steak covers Lake Oswego, Kennedy’s handles Eugene, Golden Valley Brewery serves wine-country McMinnville (with a Beaverton sibling), and Washington Street Steakhouse anchors the small town of Dallas. Down south, the Butterfly Club is the Medford option.
The national chains
Oregon carries remarkably little of the national presence — just two entries, both in Portland: Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris. For a state this size that is unusually low, and it is part of why the independents here are worth seeking out.
