Misty's Steakhouse & Brewery

The Restaurant

Misty's Steakhouse & Brewery occupies a corner storefront at 200 North 11th Street, three blocks from the State Capitol and within walking distance of Memorial Stadium, and has been a Lincoln institution and a Husker pre-game tradition for over forty years. The original Misty's opened in 1965 on Havelock Avenue, and the downtown room — now the flagship — runs in classic American steakhouse register: dark-stained walnut booths, brass fixtures, framed Cornhusker memorabilia, the kind of room where four generations of the same family have ordered the same prime rib for fifty years.

The cooking does not pretend to be anything other than a serious American steakhouse and earns the position. The hand-carved prime rib — the signature — is dry-aged in-house, slow-roasted to medium-rare, and finished tableside; portions run twelve, sixteen, and twenty-two ounces. Beyond the rib, the menu runs through Nebraska sirloin, ribeye, filet, and a thick-cut Tomahawk for two, all sourced from a small group of Nebraska feedlots that have supplied the kitchen for decades. Sides keep to the classics: au gratin potatoes, creamed corn, sautéed mushrooms, a wedge salad with house blue cheese.

The wine programme is wider than the room would suggest — well over two hundred references with serious depth in California Cabernet and Bordeaux — and the in-house brewery, Misty's own, pours a rotating selection of pale ales, lagers, and a winter stout. Service is genuinely friendly: many of the captains have worked the room for fifteen, twenty, or more years, and they remember regulars by their usual order. On a Husker home weekend the dining room is the most contested in the city; on a weekday in February it can deliver the same prime rib in a quarter-full room. Both are part of the experience.