Wyoming Steakhouses | SteakMap

The Best Steakhouses in Wyoming

Wyoming has 12 steakhouses across 10 towns. It is the least populous state in the country, and the roster reads like it: Jackson has three, Teton Village has one, and the rest are single rooms in places like Encampment, Beulah and Dubois — towns you reach deliberately or not at all.

As in Montana and South Dakota, there is not one national chain steakhouse in the state. Every room below is independent.

All twelve

1. Million Dollar Cowboy Steakhouse (Jackson) — beneath the most famous saloon in the American West, on the town square. The story of how it got there is below, and it involves an explosion.
2. Just LeDoux It Saloon & Steak Out (Big Horn) — Prime steaks in the historic Bozeman Trail Inn, named for a world champion bronc rider who became a country star. Also below.
3. Steadfire Chophouse (Teton Village) — at the base of the tram in Jackson Hole, and the most polished dining room in the state.
4. The Restaurant at White Buffalo Club (Jackson) — small, expensive and serious, and the one Jackson locals book when somebody else is paying.
5. Local Restaurant & Bar (Jackson) — Wyoming beef cooked plainly and well, a few doors off the square.
6. Cavalryman Steakhouse (Laramie) — south of town on the old highway, and the university town’s big-occasion room for decades.
7. The Bozeman Trail Steakhouse (Buffalo) — named, like the inn at Big Horn, for the 1860s wagon route that ran from the Oregon Trail up to the Montana gold fields.
8. The Prime Rib Restaurant & Wine Cellar (Gillette) — the best wine list in the Powder River Basin, which is a smaller contest than it sounds and a better room than you would expect.
9. The Lodge at 3 Spear Ranch (Dubois) — a working ranch between the Winds and the Absarokas, serving dinner to people who drove a long way for it.
10. Buffalo Jump Steakhouse (Beulah) — in the far northeast corner near the South Dakota line, named for the cliffs Plains tribes used to hunt bison.
11. White Mountain Mining Co. (Rock Springs) — the southwest corner’s steak dinner, in old coal country.
12. The Divide Restaurant & Lounge (Encampment) — population around 450, in the Sierra Madre. The most remote entry on this page.

The steakhouse is in the basement that blew up

It started as Ruby’s Saloon in the early 1930s. Ben Goe Sr., who had been managing the place for Joe Ruby, bought it outright and renamed it in 1939. It has been a Wyoming landmark on the Jackson town square since 1937.

Around 1945 a man named Preston Parkinson bought it — and then a gas explosion tore out the basement. The rebuild was expensive enough that when it was finished, Parkinson added a word to the name. That is where the “Million Dollar” in Million Dollar Cowboy Bar comes from: not a boast about the decor, but a complaint about a repair bill.

The decor earned it anyway. The bar itself was carved by Jack Kranenberg and Nels Elder, and roughly six hundred silver dollars are embedded in the top of it. In 1973 the ordinary stools were pulled out and replaced with actual saddles, each with its own small blanket — which is the detail every photograph of Wyoming nightlife has featured ever since.

And the Million Dollar Cowboy Steakhouse sits directly underneath all of it — in the rebuilt basement. You eat dinner in the room that gave the bar upstairs its name.

Named for a bronc rider, by Garth Brooks

Chris LeDoux was a Wyoming kid who became a world champion bareback bronc rider and is in the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. He also sold tapes out of the back of his truck at rodeos, and kept going: 36 albums, more than six million copies. He died in 2005.

His friend Garth Brooks wrote “Good Ride Cowboy” for him, and the lyric runs: when she starts to twist, be more like Chris, pull your hat down tight, and just LeDoux it.

That line is now a steakhouse. Just LeDoux It Saloon & Steak Out opened as a food trailer on Main Street in Sheridan in August 2020, discovered that running a trailer through a Wyoming winter is a bad idea, and moved in September 2021 into the historic Bozeman Trail Inn at Big Horn. It kept the old saloon’s LED tree and neon sign, serves Prime steaks, and has its own line of spirits.

It is the only steakhouse in this directory named after a song lyric about a rodeo cowboy.

Two trails and a buffalo jump

Wyoming names its restaurants after the ground they stand on. The Bozeman Trail Steakhouse in Buffalo and the Bozeman Trail Inn at Big Horn both take their name from the 1860s wagon route that cut north from the Oregon Trail to the Montana gold fields — a shortcut that crossed Lakota hunting grounds and was abandoned after Red Cloud’s War. Buffalo Jump Steakhouse up in Beulah is named for the cliffs that Plains tribes drove bison over, a hunting method older than the horse on this continent.

Browse the state by city: Jackson, Laramie and Teton Village.