Tennessee Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Tennessee

Tennessee has 60 steakhouses across 16 cities in this directory, and the distribution tells you something before you read a single description: Nashville holds 27 of them — nearly half the state. Memphis has 6, Franklin and Knoxville 5 each, Chattanooga 4. Most of Nashville’s arrived in the last fifteen years. One of them opened in 1934.

The Tennessee Ten

1. Jimmy Kelly’s (Nashville) — the oldest fine dining restaurant in the city, open since 1934 in a two-story Southern mansion and run today by Mike Kelly, the fourth generation of his family to do it. The story below is the best one in the state.
2. Bourbon Steak (Nashville) — Michael Mina’s room at the JW Marriott, and the highest-rated steakhouse in the city by a clear margin.
3. Kayne Prime (The Gulch) — the most inventive steakhouse in Nashville, and the one that treats the format as something to play with rather than preserve.
4. Folk’s Folly (Memphis) — the city’s first dedicated prime steakhouse, opened in 1977 in a converted bungalow on South Mendenhall. Voted Best Steak in the Memphis Flyer readers’ poll every year since 1994.
5. Ye Olde Steak House (Knoxville) — a former antique store turned steakhouse in 1968 by Bunt and Helen King, still run by their three children, still serving Iowa grain-fed beef.
6. The Twelve Thirty Club (Broadway) — the supper club above the honky-tonks, and the most ambitious room built on Lower Broad in a generation.
7. Jeff Ruby’s (Nashville) — the Cincinnati family’s Nashville room, and an unapologetic big-night-out steakhouse.
8. Oak Steakhouse (Nashville) — the Indigo Road group’s Tennessee room, running the same dry-aging program as its siblings in North Carolina and Georgia.
9. Bridgeman’s Chophouse (Chattanooga) — inside the historic Read House hotel, and the city’s most reliable steak.
10. Zaya 1943 Korean Steakhouse (Chattanooga) — tabletop Korean grilling in a mid-sized Tennessee city, and the least predictable entry on this page.

Nashville’s steakhouse boom is new. Jimmy Kelly’s is ninety.

Twenty-seven steakhouses in one city is a lot, and Nashville did not build them gradually. Most of the list above and below arrived with the boom — the relocations, the bachelorette trade, the Lower Broadway build-out. It is a very new restaurant town wearing an old hat.

Jimmy Kelly’s was there for all of it, and for three generations before it.

The Kelly family left Ireland during the Famine in 1848. The story the family tells is that the patriarch, James Kelly, made the crossing with copper tubing for a whiskey still tucked inside his shirt — which is either the most practical thing a man could carry to America or the most optimistic, and in the event it turned out to be both. They settled in Tennessee. His son opened a saloon and rode the whiskey business through the long American argument about whether it should be legal.

In 1934 — one year after the repeal of Prohibition, which is not a coincidence — Jimmy Kelly opened the steakhouse, with a stated intention to serve a great steak and pour a generous portion of whiskey. Ninety-odd years later that is still an accurate menu description. Mike Kelly runs it now, the fourth generation to do so, out of a two-story Southern mansion that feels nothing like the city that grew up around it.

It is the single best argument on this site for why a directory like this exists. Nashville will sell you a very good steak in a very new room on almost any block. Only one place has been doing it since the year after you could legally order the whiskey to go with it.

The Tennessee pattern is the family business

Jimmy Kelly’s is the oldest example, not the only one. Across the state the best independent steakhouses tend to be the ones that got handed down.

In Memphis, Humphrey Folk Jr. had no restaurant experience whatsoever when he bought a bungalow on South Mendenhall Road in 1977 and decided the city needed a proper prime steakhouse. His friends told him that if it did not work it would be a folly. He named it Folk’s Folly and opened with 81 seats. After seven renovations it now seats more than 300, his son has run it for years, and it has won the Memphis Flyer readers’ poll for best steak every single year since 1994.

In Knoxville, Bunt and Helen King turned a former antique store into Ye Olde Steak House in 1968 and committed to Iowa grain-fed beef, which they still buy. Bunt died in 1987 and Helen in 2003; their three children have run it ever since. The beef still comes from the same part of the country it always did — the Iowa corn belt, several hundred miles northwest.

Around the state

Beyond the Ten, Nashville runs deep: The Southern Steak & Oyster, Hall’s Chophouse, Butchertown Hall, Urban Grub, Deacon’s New South, The 404 Kitchen, The Standard, Harper’s, Hand Cut, E3 Chophouse, Sinatra Bar & Lounge and The Detroit Cowboy.

Memphis adds Porch and Parlor, The Majestic Grille and Flight. Knoxville has Fire & Smoke and Connors, with The Walnut Kitchen just south in Maryville. Franklin carries Cork & Cow and Serrato’s, and Chattanooga adds Malone’s.

Out in the smaller towns: Edward’s in Clarksville, Prime & Pint in Columbia, CH Steak Lounge in Cookeville, Steakhouse Five in Murfreesboro, Label in Johnson City, and Americano up at Roan Mountain. In the Smokies, Gatlinburg has The Greenbrier and Crystelle Creek.

The national chains

Nashville is a convention city now, and the brands followed. Dependable, not local: Ruth’s Chris runs four locations in the state (Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga), Fleming’s three and Stoney River three, plus Morton’s, STK, Eddie V’s, Del Frisco’s Grille and Perry’s out in Cool Springs.

Browse the state by city: Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga.