Charlie Palmer Steak

The Restaurant

Charlie Palmer Steak opened inside the Grand Sierra Resort at 2500 East Second Street in 2007 — the Reno outpost of the James Beard-winning American chef's national steakhouse group, which also runs rooms in Manhattan, Washington DC and Las Vegas. The dining room runs about a hundred and forty covers across a long, double-height space with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Sierra Nevada range to the west, a circular booth section at the centre of the room, and a polished mahogany bar tracking the eastern wall. The Reno location holds the same Charlie Palmer design vocabulary — leather, exposed timber, brass — that made the original Manhattan room a defining piece of late-1990s American steakhouse architecture.

The cooking is neo-traditional American steakhouse with the Palmer signature of culinary precision over theatricality. Beef runs through Certified Angus Beef USDA Prime cuts sourced from a small group of Midwestern family farms — a 12-ounce filet mignon, a 16-ounce ribeye, a 24-ounce porterhouse, and the room's most-ordered piece, a 42-ounce dry-aged porterhouse for two. A rotating Cut of the Week programme highlights a featured premium cut — sometimes a Japanese A5 sirloin, sometimes an American Wagyu coulotte — at a price below the standard menu rate. Beyond beef, the kitchen handles No. 1 grade ahi tuna, a pan-seared Diver scallop appetiser, a five-onion soup that has been on the menu since opening, and a tableside Caesar that runs alongside the Atlantis equivalent as one of the best in the city.

Desserts are made fresh daily in the in-house pastry kitchen and lean toward classic American steakhouse register — a baked Alaska, a flourless chocolate cake with bourbon caramel, a tableside crème brûlée. The wine programme runs to around four hundred references with serious depth in California Cabernet, a rotating set of Bordeaux verticals, and a strong Champagne by-the-glass list. Service is the most polished in the Grand Sierra property — many of the captains have worked the room for over a decade, and the staff handle a four-top, a private dining of fourteen, and a single business guest at the bar with the same composure.