Every casino in this city has a steakhouse. Most of them exist for the same reason there’s a gift shop next to the elevators: you’re already in the building, you’re hungry, and you’re not walking two miles for something better. The beef is prime, the room is dark, the wedge salad is nineteen dollars, and you won’t remember a bite of it on the plane ride home.
Then there’s the other kind. Maybe fifteen places in this whole valley where somebody is actually paying attention. To the aging. To the fire. To the server who’s worked the same station for thirty years and knows exactly when to leave you alone.
The catch is that you can’t tell which is which from the price. Some of the most expensive beef in town is the most forgettable, and two of the best steaks we ate this year came out of resturants with carpet older than we are. So that’s the sorting principle. Everything below either does something nobody else in the city does, or does the oldest thing in the world well enough that you don’t care it’s been done a thousand times. All of it is open as of this week, which is more than most Vegas lists can promise.
Some of the Originals that Still Are Worth a Look..
Golden Steer
308 W. Sahara Ave. This is the one everybody’s heard of, and for once the hype mostly holds up. Red tufted booths, wood paneling, a room that looks like the mob is about to walk in because the mob actually used to. Scenes in Casino were shot here. The booths carry brass plaques: 20 for Sammy Davis Jr., 21 for Dean Martin, 22 for Frank, all three still sitting next to each other. John Wayne had 25.
Small fact the Steer would rather you skipped: the “Est. 1958” on the sign is doing some heavy lifting. The restaurant’s original address was 308 W. San Francisco Street, and San Francisco Street didn’t become Sahara Avenue until February 1962, which makes the 1958 claim hard to square. Casino.org went through this in detail and came away unconvinced. Bob Taylor’s, seven years older, has a better claim to being the oldest steakhouse in town.
Does any of that change how the food tastes? No. The tableside Caesar is worth ordering, the bone marrow is the sleeper, and the tuxedoed servers still do the flaming dessert thing without a hint of irony. Two warnings. They enforce the dress code, so leave the ball cap and the flip-flops at the hotel. And they will not honor reservations bought through a third-party reseller, so book through OpenTable, their site, or the phone.
Bob Taylor’s Original Ranch House
6250 Rio Vista St., way up in the northwest — yes it’s a drive, and YES it is worth it. Open since 1955, inside an actual ranch house, with a mesquite grill you can watch and a place that hasn’t been meaningfully redecorated since around the time Elvis was shooting skeet on the property for Viva Las Vegas. There are cats living outside. Nobody’s doing anything about the cats.
The smoked prime rib is the order. If you’re feeling stupid, the 32-ounce Diamond Jim Brady New York runs $84.99 and finishing it gets you a free dessert, which is a bet the house wins most nights. Everything comes with soup or salad and garlic cheese bread, which tells you what era of hospitality you’ve walked into. This is our favorite steakhouse in Las Vegas that most visitors will never see.
Hugo’s Cellar
Down a flight of stairs off the Four Queens casino floor, downtown. Every woman who walks in gets a long-stemmed rose. You can spot Hugo’s diners crossing the casino afterward by the flowers.
Here’s why it’s still on the list nine years later: the math. The chicken is $40, salmon around $47, steaks run into the $50s and $60s, and every entree comes with the bread basket, the tableside salad cart (mixed in front of you with a dozen add-ins, and it’s nearly a meal), a vegetable, potatoes or wild rice, a sorbet intermezzo, and a plate of chocolate-dipped strawberries, figs, and apricots to close. Add up what that costs à la carte on the Strip and Hugo’s might be the best value in fine dining in the city. It’s dark, the servers are in tuxedos, several of them have been there decades. Open nightly at 5.
The Steak House at Circus Circus
Yes, Circus Circus. We put this on the 2017 list and we’re putting it on this one, because the resturant has been grilling dry-aged beef over mesquite charcoal since 1982 while the clowns do their thing three hundred feet away. Red leather booths, dark wood, a dry-aging locker with floor-to-ceiling glass, a menu that doesn’t waste your time with pages of options. Order the black bean soup, which sounds like a throwaway and isn’t. Early dining specials run 4 to 6 p.m. Walk past the midway, don’t make eye contact with the Adventuredome, and enjoy one of the more consistent steaks on the north Strip.
Andiamo Steakhouse at the D
Upstairs at the D on Fremont, and the Detroit lineage is real. Derek Stevens is from Detroit, Joe Vicari’s Andiamo is a Detroit institution, and the whole thing came west together. White dinner jackets, Sinatra on the speakers, big upholstered booths, beef from Pat LaFrieda and Stockyard.
The play is the prix fixe. Sixty bucks a person for a full Italian menu, with seatings starting at 4 p.m. and again later in the evening. Downtown gets loud and dumb after dark, and Andiamo sits above it in a spot that acts like the zipline outside doesn’t exist.
The Strip Resturants worth the money
Bazaar Meat by José Andrés
Moved. This matters, because half the internet still lists it at the Sahara. The last night on the north Strip was July 31, 2025, and it reopened inside the Palazzo at the Venetian on September 4. The new spot is bigger and moodier, deep red, with a ceiling of soft bulbs that somehow doesn’t blow out the whole space.
The food is still the wildest steakhouse cooking in Nevada. Andrés treats “steakhouse” as a suggestion, and the menu can be flat-out overwhelming the first time, which we said in 2017 and still mean. Order things you can’t get elsewhere rather than defaulting to a ribeye. If somebody in your group only wants a piece of beef cooked medium, take them to CUT instead, twenty feet down the hall.
CUT by Wolfgang Puck
Also in the Palazzo. Nine years on, it’s still the most reliable high-end steak on the Strip, which is a compliment. Prime dry- and wet-aged beef, A5 wagyu if you want to spend it, the bread basket people actually talk about, and a bar menu called Rough Cuts if you can’t get a table or don’t want a two-hour dinner. Sunday through Thursday it opens at 5, Friday and Saturday at 4. Business casual, and they mean it.
Peter Luger at Caesars Palace
The Brooklyn original opened in 1887 and this is its first location outside New York. Skeptics assumed a Vegas Luger would be a merch play. It isn’t. They built a 4,000-square-foot dry-aging facility in the basement, and if you’re friendly about it they’ll show it to you.
Order the porterhouse for two, buttered and broiled, with the house sauce that arrives in a gravy boat. Get the thick-cut bacon as an appetizer, dip the bread in the sauce, get the Holy Cow sundae. Here’s the insider move: lunch. The power lunch is $49.95 for an appetizer, main, side, and dessert, and the Luger burger is lunch-only. For the Strip in 2026, fifty dollars for four courses at a 135-year-old steakhouse is close to a joke.
The downside, because reviews get testy about this: the place runs fast and slightly chaotic, the service is efficient rather than warm, and if you want a server who chats, this isn’t it. Some people find that charming. Some people find it rude. It’s Brooklyn. That’s the deal.
Bavette’s Steakhouse at Park MGM
The Chicago import took over the old Monte Carlo space in 2017 and it’s been packed ever since. Red leather banquettes, low light, jazz, and a French tilt that keeps it from feeling like every other dark room with a wine list. Get the ribeye, the mashed potatoes, and the lemon meringue pie, which is not optional.
Two practical things. Park MGM is the only smoke-free casino on the Strip, and after a couple of hours in a normal Vegas casino you will notice the difference. And they sell their steak salt in jars at the restaurant for about eight bucks, which is the best souvenir in town.
Maroon by Kwame Onwuachi
New, and the most interesting thing to open here in years. Onwuachi is the James Beard winner behind Tatiana in New York and D?gon in DC, and Maroon is his first restaurant on the West Coast. It debuted at the Sahara on April 24, 2026, in the space Bazaar Meat left behind, with a grand opening party the following week.
It’s a steakhouse built around a custom jerk pit. The framework is Afro-Caribbean, the design pulls from both Jamaican Maroon history and the look of southwestern slot canyons, and there’s a curried goat agnolotti that has no business being as good as it is. Reservations drop daily at midnight and go fast. Whether it’s the best steak in Vegas is arguable. Whether it’s the most worth going out of your way for right now isn’t.
Where locals actually eat
Herbs & Rye
3713 W. Sahara. We said in 2017 that we almost didn’t include this because we didn’t want to wait for a table. That ship has sailed. Word got out, and now you should book.
The happy hour is still the reason. Half-off steaks, twice a night, from 5 to 8 p.m. and again from midnight until close around 3 a.m., Monday through Saturday. They’re closed Sundays now. The flat iron is the cheap way in, the cocktail program is one of the best in the country, and the bacon is still thicker than most restaurants’ steaks. A half-price ribeye at 1 a.m. from a bar that takes classic cocktails this seriously is a Vegas experience in a way that a $200 tomahawk is not.
Cleaver
3900 Paradise Road, Suite D, in the back hallway of a shopping complex, a mile from the Convention Center. Same crew as Herbs & Rye, opened 2018, and they’ll tell you themselves they’re sisters and not twins: better cuts, deeper spirits shelf, a much bigger menu, and a spot where you can actually see the person across from you. Portraits of dead celebrities on the walls, zero pretension.
The porterhouse for two with the black garlic butter is the order, and people who come for the steak end up talking about the pork belly mac and cheese for a week afterward. The cocktail list is organized by era, from turn-of-the-century through the tiki revival to the Dale DeGroff years, which is either delightful or exhausting depending on who you’re with. Happy hour runs 5 to 8 every night.
Practical: open daily 5 p.m. to midnight, last seating at 11, kitchen closes at 11:30. Parking front and back, and it’s free, because it’s off-Strip. This is the answer when Herbs & Rye is booked, when there are six of you, or when you’re at a convention and cannot look at another banquet chicken.
Echo & Rig
Tivoli Village, 440 S. Rampart. Sam Marvin built this as an argument against the traditional steakhouse: bright instead of dark, a butcher shop at the front instead of a shrine to beef out back, and cuts priced by the ounce so you can order a tri-tip or a bavette for the price of a sandwich elsewhere. It works. It’s the rare steakhouse you can go to on a Tuesday without an occasion.
Lunch, weekend brunch, and complimentary valet from Tivoli, which is a bigger deal than it sounds now that everything on the Strip charges for parking. Dining room is upstairs, bar and butcher counter downstairs, balcony seating when the weather cooperates for about six weeks a year. There’s a Henderson location too.
Mae Daly’s Fine Steaks & Whiskeys
2211 S. Las Vegas Blvd., across from the Strat, and the backstory is worth knowing. Richard Femenella came out from New York in 1997 to build and open Aureole at Mandalay Bay and Charlie Palmer Steak next door, ran the Stirling Club for eight years, then got hit with advanced lymphoma in 2020, lost a hundred pounds, and had to learn to walk again. He started designing this restaurant from the hospital bed. It opened in July 2024, named for a Prohibition-era saloonkeeper, and he built it as a standalone off the casino floor on purpose, because he wanted a spot for the people who live here.
Four styles of prime beef: wet-aged, dry-aged, American wagyu, and grass-fed organic. Art Deco room, prohibition-era cocktails, live jazz on Thursday, a patio with a cigar night, soufflés made to order, and free valet on Las Vegas Boulevard, which is nearly a political statement in 2026. The owner is usually in the dining room. It shows.
Barry’s Downtown Prime and Vic & Anthony’s
Two downtown spots we’re grouping together because they solve the same problem. Barry Dakake’s place, in the basement at Circa, is the loud, glossy, tableside-Caesar, big-night-out version. It picked up a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence in 2025. Vic & Anthony’s at the Golden Nugget is the quiet one: dim, plush, prime Midwest beef, a spot where you talk instead of shout. Pick according to your mood and the size of your group.
Cheap steak, because it still exists
Nothing above is under fifty bucks a head, so here’s the other half of the city.
The Ellis Island steak special is the classic, and it’s still $9.99. It’s a filet-cut top sirloin, it’s not printed on the menu, and you order it in the 24-hour Village Pub by asking. Sign up for the Passport Players Club card, run five dollars through a machine, and pull the coupon off the kiosk. The steak is not going to change your life. It’s a real piece of beef at 4 a.m. for the price of two Strip coffees, which is a different kind of great. There’s steak and eggs on the board too, around $13.
Jackson’s Bar & Grill on West Flamingo does a ribeye special that runs in the low twenties: a full pound, hand-cut, never frozen, with two sides and Texas toast, available at any hour because the kitchen never closes. They move roughly 200 a day, which is the only endorsement that matters.
And the early dining special at Circus Circus, 4 to 6 p.m., gets you a dry-aged mesquite-grilled steak in a real steakhouse for less than most Strip appetizers.
Booking notes nobody tells you
Reservations open earlier than you think, and the good ones vanish at midnight when the calendar rolls, which is exactly how Maroon works right now. If a restaurant has a dress code, they enforce it, and Golden Steer will absolutely turn you away over sandals. Buy your reservations from the restaurant or OpenTable and nowhere else. If you’re eating a big steak dinner before a show, book the 4:30 or 5 p.m. seating, because these kitchens run slower and better than the Strip’s schedule assumes. And check the bill for the automatic gratuity before you tip on top of it, because plenty of these places add it at six guests and won’t mention it.
