Bones Restaurant Wins G&G’s Steak House Bracket

Three weeks ago, we launched our fourteenth annual Garden & Gun bracket, this one to crown a winner in a mouthwatering field: the South’s best steak houses. Among thirty-two big-city and small-town spots serving up the perfect seared cuts and accompanying parade of side dishes, the results are in today: Bones Restaurant in Atlanta takes the title.

A dining area inside Bones.

The venerated Buckhead institution edged out Charolais Steakhouse in Hickory, North Carolina, with 61 percent of the vote. The final resulted from two incredibly close semifinal matchups: Charolais squeaked past Pat’s Steak House in Louisville with 50.44 percent of the vote (one of the closest margins we’ve ever seen in the bracket) and Bones pulled away with 51.87 percent of the vote in its semifinal against Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi.

Incidentally, Doe’s Eat Place served as an inspiration for Richard Lewis, a native Mississippian, when he and his partner, Susan DeRose, opened Bones in 1979 when they were twenty-eight years old. “We just wanted to open a place for our friends, and didn’t have expectations of what it might be,” DeRose says. “And it just became the businessman’s restaurant overnight.” 

The mixed grill at Bones.

Since those early days, even as Bones collected accolades—and the likes of LeBron James and Scarlett Johansson stepped in to dine—not much has changed. The menu still serves up steak house classics like lobster bisque, mac and cheese, onion rings, baked potatoes, a great house salad, and perfectly marbled bone-in rib eyes and porterhouses. The walls are still studded with faded caricatures of local personalities and historic photographs of Atlanta. (That’s not to say Lewis and DeRose resist modernity: In 2010, Bones became one of the first restaurants to transfer its 1,350-strong wine list onto an iPad for guests to peruse.) The deeper reason behind the restaurant’s success—which has nothing to do with advertising or marketing, because they don’t do any—the pair says, comes down to hospitality. “We understand that people work really hard, and they come to us to be taken care of,” DeRose says. “We’re the reward. We’re the place where you meet, and the place where you celebrate.” 

A steak dinner and the interior at Charolais in Hickory, North Carolina.

The runner-up, Charolais Steakhouse in Hickory, North Carolina—originally opened in 1969—also pays respect to its roots. “A place like this has got a lot of heritage,” says Zackary Cranford of Cranford Hospitality Group, which took over as the restaurant’s third owner in 2019. “We see ourselves less as owners and more as stewards.” As such, Cranford has kept the core menu pretty much the same: The beloved forty-ingredient salad bar, with all-homemade dressings, a selection of cheeses, and a build-your-own French onion soup, is still a mainstay. So is the meat cart, which a server in a white chef’s coat pushes among patrons, inviting them to select and size their steak, be it a tomahawk rib eye, strip, or porterhouse. “The server will write your order down on a popsicle stick, and it stays with the steak to the grill and back to the table,” Cranford says. “That was how they used to do it here—the stick was the server pad back in the day—and we wanted to keep that piece of the experience.” 

The owners of both steak houses understand the importance of standout hospitality. And at Bones, the newly crowned South’s Best Steak House, you just might catch a glimpse of DeRose when the restaurant has opened its doors for service, taking a proud moment to survey her team before slipping out. “I’m just pleased as anything to see how well orchestrated they are. It’s beautiful to watch them taking care of everybody.” 

Thank you to everyone who voted in the bracket.