Chops Lobster Bar

The Restaurant

Chops Lobster Bar opened in 1989 inside Buckhead Plaza at 70 West Paces Ferry Road, the flagship operation of Pano Karatassos's Buckhead Life Restaurant Group and one of the most consistently rated steakhouses in the United States across three and a half decades. The building runs on two levels by deliberate design: upstairs is Chops — a hundred-and-twenty-seat traditional steakhouse with dark walnut walls, leather banquettes, and a long marble bar; downstairs is Lobster Bar — a more intimate eighty-seat seafood room with a curved-tile ceiling, a sunken floor plan, and a Manhattan-by-way-of-Mediterranean palette that the design press has compared favorably to Grand Central's lower oyster bar. The two operations share a kitchen and a wine cellar but carry different briefs.

The kitchen runs both menus in parallel under executive chef Stratos Kontos. Upstairs at Chops, the steakhouse format runs the way it was designed: USDA Prime aged on premises, a 32-ounce bone-in dry-aged ribeye that has been the kitchen's signature for thirty years, a 16-ounce New York strip, a Wagyu A5 program by the ounce, and a chilled raw bar built around East and West Coast oyster selections. Downstairs at Lobster Bar, the seafood programme is the point: the famous 'Signature' Cold Water South African Lobster Tail — featured on Atlanta's official Signature Dish list — anchors a menu that also runs Genuine Holland Dover Sole, Nova Scotia lobster morsels, Maine diver scallops, and a chilled shellfish tower that the room is known for. Sides — creamed corn, lobster mac, shoestring potatoes — are the proper steakhouse classics in proper depth.

The wine programme is the most-credentialed shelf in Buckhead Plaza: more than a thousand labels organized with proper depth in California Cabernet, Bordeaux first growths, Burgundy red, and a careful Rhône and Italian section, with a Champagne and big-bottle programme built to handle the closing-dinner format. The room's national reputation has been built on consistency rather than novelty — Chops Lobster Bar has been ranked among the top ten American steakhouses in fifteen of the last twenty years — and the operation's discipline is the operating thesis of the building. For Buckhead corporate work, this is the alternative to Bone's that the second meeting of the trip is often booked into.