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Why The Chop House made the SteakMap list

Ann Arbor is a university town with more good restaurants than steakhouses, and The Chop House is the room that takes beef seriously enough to carry both a dry-aged cut and graded wagyu.

The dry-aged New York strip is a 14oz. Dry-aging concentrates flavor by evaporating moisture over weeks in a controlled room, and the strip is the cut that takes it best after the ribeye — enough fat to carry the process, enough grain to keep the texture interesting.

Marble score, stated

The 16oz Wagyu ribeye is hand-cut and listed at marble score 7-8. That is a specific, checkable number, and specificity is rarer than it should be — most menus print the word wagyu and stop. A marble score in the 7-8 range is serious Australian or American wagyu, well beyond anything Angus-based, without reaching the extremes of Japanese A5.

The board

Filet mignon at 8oz and 11oz. The dry-aged strip at 14oz and a standard New York strip at 15oz with roasted garlic, herbs and brown butter. A 21oz Cowboy Steak. A 36oz porterhouse for two, filet and strip on one bone.

And a Beef Wellington with mushroom duxelle, goose liver paté and puff pastry — a dish almost nobody attempts anymore because it is difficult, unforgiving, and impossible to fire quickly.

The 6oz filet is built as a composed plate rather than a bare steak: truffle butter, sautéed spinach, beech mushrooms, black garlic cauliflower purée and a cabernet demi-glace, for anyone who would rather have a smaller cut treated as the center of a dish.

Prices

The Chop House does not publish steak prices on its web menu, so SteakMap has no verified figures. The sauces are listed at $4.99 — béarnaise, cognac peppercorn, cabernet demi-glace and porcini butter — which gives some sense of the room.

There is a sister room in Grand Rapids. See every dry-aged steakhouse in Michigan.