South Dakota Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in South Dakota

South Dakota has 13 steakhouses across 9 towns, and the distribution contains one genuinely strange fact: Deadwood has three of them — exactly as many as Sioux Falls. Sioux Falls has about 210,000 people. Deadwood has roughly 1,200.

There is a specific, documented reason for that, and it is below. Like Montana, the state also carries no national chain steakhouses at all.

The South Dakota Ten

1. Deadwood Legends Steakhouse (Deadwood) — inside the Franklin Hotel, opened 1903, on Main Street. Certified Angus aged 28 days. Theodore Roosevelt stayed in this building. That it is still standing at all is the subject of the section below.
2. Morrie’s Steakhouse (Sioux Falls) — opened 2004 and named for Morrie Richards, a lifelong farmer from Ipswich, South Dakota. The most decorated room in the state.
3. Crawford’s (Sioux Falls) — downtown, clubby, and the city’s choice for a night that matters.
4. Ironwood (Sioux Falls) — the contemporary entry, and the one doing the most interesting cooking in town.
5. Delmonico Grill (Rapid City) — named for the cut and the New York original, in a restored downtown building. The best steak in the Black Hills.
6. Dakotah Steakhouse (Rapid City) — local beef and bison, and the more Western of the city’s two.
7. 1885 Steakhouse & Saloon (Hill City) — named for the year the town was founded, in the middle of the Black Hills between Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse.
8. Maverick’s Steak & Cocktails (Aberdeen) — a South Dakota group rather than a national one, with rooms in Deadwood and Watertown as well.
9. Craft Chophouse (Brookings) — the college town’s serious option, near South Dakota State.
10. Club Vega (Kimball) — population around 700, just off I-90 halfway across the state. The sort of supper club people plan a drive around.

Deadwood legalized gambling to save its own buildings

Gold was found in the Black Hills in 1875. Deadwood was founded the following year and grew to about 25,000 people almost immediately — the last major gold rush in the continental United States. It pulled in Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane, Seth Bullock, and Wild Bill Hickok, who was shot dead there on 2 August 1876, holding the hand that has been called a dead man’s ever since.

Then the gold ran out, as it always does. The town shrank by more than ninety-five percent. The entire town was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961 — which is an honor that comes with no money attached. By the 1980s Deadwood was, in the words of one account, a dying community with no preservation budget and a main street of nineteenth-century buildings quietly falling down.

So in 1989 the town legalized limited gaming, explicitly and specifically to fund historic preservation. It is one of the few places in America where gambling was legalized as a heritage policy rather than a revenue grab.

It worked. More than $170 million in public and private money has since gone into restoring Deadwood, making it one of the largest ongoing historic preservation projects in North America. The buildings on Main Street are standing because of the slot machines inside them.

Which is why a town of 1,200 supports three steakhouses, and why Legends can serve dinner in a hotel that opened in 1903 and once put up a sitting president. The casino floor pays for the roof.

No chains, and not many people

South Dakota has no national chain steakhouse anywhere in the state — a distinction it shares with Montana, Wyoming, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine and North Dakota. The arithmetic is the same as Montana’s: fewer than a million people spread across 77,000 square miles, which is not a map any chain’s site-selection model likes.

The nearest thing is Maverick’s, a South Dakota company with three rooms in Aberdeen, Deadwood and Watertown. Homegrown, so it sits above rather than at the bottom of this page.

The one remaining listing is Brandon Steakhouse & Lounge, just east of Sioux Falls.

Browse the state by city: Sioux Falls, Deadwood and Rapid City.