Wisconsin Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Wisconsin

Wisconsin has 47 steakhouses spread across 34 towns — the most scattered roster in this directory. Milwaukee holds only 8, Madison 3, Wisconsin Dells 3, and everything else is one or two per town, from Door County to Superior to a crossroads called Genesee Depot.

That scatter is the whole point. Wisconsin did not build its steak culture in cities. It built it in supper clubs — on lakes, along two-lane highways, out where the land was cheap — and it is the only state in this directory where the dominant format has its own name, its own rituals and its own drink.

The Wisconsin Ten

1. Ishnala Supper Club (Lake Delton) — the most beautiful dining room in the state and probably the Midwest. Live Norway pines grow up through the roof, the floor is 76 tons of flagstone, and the windows look over Mirror Lake inside a state park. Built in its current form in 1953. Seasonal, so check before you drive.
2. The Del-Bar (Wisconsin Dells) — a six-table roadside cabin in 1943 that became a Prairie-style landmark designed by James Dresser, a Frank Lloyd Wright protege who happened to be a regular. He designed every expansion for nearly forty years.
3. Mr. B’s: A Bartolotta Steakhouse (Brookfield) — the Bartolotta group’s steakhouse and the most consistently excellent beef in metro Milwaukee, cooked over wood. A second room in Mequon.
4. Mo’s: A Place for Steaks (Milwaukee) — downtown, loud, Prime, and the city’s big-night-out default for twenty years.
5. Ward’s House of Prime (Milwaukee) — prime rib as the main event rather than an afterthought, which is rarer than it should be.
6. Carnevor (Milwaukee) — the dark, modern, design-forward counterweight to everything else on this list.
7. Eddie Martini’s (Wauwatosa) — a 1940s-style supper club done properly, and the best martini in the state by reputation.
8. The Wisconsin Room (Kohler) — in the original dining hall of The American Club, which has held a AAA Five Diamond rating for 34 consecutive years. The most formal room in the state.
9. Alexander’s of Door County (Fish Creek) — the peninsula’s steakhouse, with Chop up the road in Sister Bay.
10. Johnny Delmonico’s (Madison) — the capital’s classic, on the Square.

Ishnala was a Ho-Chunk ceremonial ground before it was a supper club

The land Ishnala sits on was a ceremonial ground of the Ho-Chunk long before any of this. Settlers bought it in 1826 and put up a log cabin trading post. The Coleman family turned it into a private home in 1909. In 1953 the Hoffman brothers bought it and built the restaurant that stands there now — and crucially, they built it around what was already there rather than clearing it.

So the original stone fireplace, log walls and staircase are still in the building, the dining room floor is 76 tons of flagstone cut from a quarry down the road, and live Norway pines stand in their original positions, growing straight through the roof. Nobody designs a restaurant this way now. Nobody could get it approved.

A few miles away, The Del-Bar took the opposite route to the same result. Jim and Alice Wimmer bought a six-table roadside cabin in 1943 — the name is a contraction, one owner from the Dells and one from Baraboo. A regular customer named James Dresser, who had trained under Frank Lloyd Wright, became their friend and then their architect, and designed every single expansion — 1952, 1963, 1980 and 1990. The result is a working Prairie-style building that happens to serve steak, and it is still family-run after eighty years.

Why a Wisconsin steakhouse hands you a brandy

Order an old fashioned in most of America and you get whiskey. Order one in Wisconsin and you get brandy, muddled with orange and cherry, topped with soda, and the server will ask whether you want it sweet, sour or press. This is not an affectation. It is the single most reliable marker of a genuine supper club, and it traces to one event.

At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, three Czech brothers — Josef, Antone and Francis Korbel — brought crates of their California brandy to hand out to fairgoers. Wisconsin’s large German and central European population tasted something that reminded them of home, and took the habit back north with them.

It never left. Wisconsin alone now takes roughly a third of Korbel’s entire annual brandy output, and Wisconsin and Minnesota together account for about 60 percent of the company’s brandy sales. Two states, well under 3 percent of the American population, drinking the clear majority of one distillery’s production — because of free samples handed out at a world’s fair a hundred and thirty years ago.

The relish tray that arrives before the steak comes from the same tradition, and so does the Friday fish fry that half these places run. The supper club is a complete format, not a decorating choice.

Milwaukee, Madison and the cities

Milwaukee’s eight also include Milwaukee Chophouse, The Milwaukee Steakhouse, The Edison, Rare Steakhouse and Carson’s at Fiserv Forum. Madison adds Rare and Draper Brothers Chophouse, and Green Bay has Republic Chophouse. Appleton offers Vince Lombardi’s Steak House, which in this state requires no further explanation.

The supper clubs and small towns

This is where Wisconsin actually lives. Butler Inn in Pewaukee, Union House at Genesee Depot, Palmer’s in Hartland, The Palms Supper Club and Wish in Weston, Hi-Point at Ridgeway, Wilmot Stage Stop, 1855 Saloon in Cottage Grove, Sebastian’s in Fond du Lac, Corner House in Racine, Hunt Club at Lake Geneva, TJ Highland in Oshkosh, North Shore Chophouse in Fort Atkinson, The Freighthouse in La Crosse, Houligans in Eau Claire, Su Casa in Holmen, and in the Dells Kaminski’s Chop House and Fields at the Wilderness.

The national chains

Two in the entire state: Fleming’s in Brookfield and Ruth’s Chris in Middleton. Two names that look like chains are not: The Palms Supper Club in Weston has nothing to do with The Palm, and Wissota Chophouse is a Wisconsin-grown group with rooms in Chippewa Falls, De Pere, Janesville, Neenah, Stevens Point and Superior, plus one over the line in Iowa.

Browse the state by city: Milwaukee, Madison and Wisconsin Dells.