West Virginia Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in West Virginia

West Virginia has six steakhouses in this directory, in six different towns. It is the smallest roster on the site, and we are not going to pad it — a state of 1.8 million people spread through the Appalachians does not support a dense steakhouse scene, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

What it does have is one of the genuinely remarkable steak rooms in America, sitting on top of a Cold War secret.

All six

1. Prime 44 West (White Sulphur Springs) — the steakhouse at The Greenbrier, and the best restaurant in the state by a wide margin. Named for Jerry West, the West Virginia native who wore 44 for the Lakers. The signature order is the 44-ounce porterhouse, and the room holds the largest public collection of Jerry West memorabilia anywhere — over 100 pieces, from high school through the NBA. More on the resort below.
2. 21 at the Frederick (Huntington) — in the historic Frederick building downtown, and the best steak in the Ohio Valley end of the state.
3. Huffman’s Prime Steakhouse (Parkersburg) — Prime beef on the Ohio River, and the reason to stop in Parkersburg.
4. Cheetah B’s (Petersburg) — a Potomac Highlands favorite with a following well out of proportion to the size of the town.
5. 317 The Steak House (Logan) — deep in the southern coalfields, where a proper steak dinner is a genuine event.
6. Firecreek BBQ & Steaks (Fayetteville) — smoke and beef near the New River Gorge, and the obvious stop after a day on the water.

A 44-ounce porterhouse, served above the bunker built for Congress

The Greenbrier has been a resort since the sulphur spring was found in 1778. It is a National Historic Landmark. It is also, beneath the lawn, the place the United States government intended to move the legislative branch if the Soviets started a nuclear war.

In 1955 Dwight Eisenhower ordered the Defense Department to plan for the continuity of Congress under nuclear attack. The answer was dug into the hillside at White Sulphur Springs between 1959 and 1962, hidden in plain sight by being built at the same time as the resort’s new West Virginia Wing — so the construction traffic had an innocent explanation. It cost $14 million and was finished on 16 October 1962, which is the week the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

It ran under three code names — Project X, then Project Caspar, then Project Greek Island. 112,544 square feet, 720 feet into the hillside, built for 1,000 people including all 535 members of Congress. Behind a 25-ton blast door there were dormitories, a cafeteria, a power plant, a decontamination chamber, a medical wing, a small jail, and full chambers for both the House and the Senate.

It stayed secret from 1958 until 1992, through seven presidencies, with resort staff and local townspeople keeping it quiet, until The Washington Post published the story and the facility was decommissioned. You can tour it now.

Then you can go upstairs and eat a 44-ounce porterhouse named after a basketball player from Chelyan, West Virginia. There is no other steakhouse in this directory with a day quite like that attached to it.

No national chains

Worth saying plainly: there is not a single national chain steakhouse in West Virginia. Not one Ruth’s Chris, not one Fleming’s, not one Morton’s. All six rooms above are independent. Only a handful of states can say that — the others are Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and North Dakota, which tells you exactly what kind of company West Virginia keeps: mountain states where the chains never found enough traffic to bother.

Browse by city: White Sulphur Springs, Huntington and Parkersburg.