The best restaurants are built to delight diners.
They bathe you in the glow of warm, golden light. They understand that a big part of dining out is taking care of those who come through the restaurant’s front door hoping to exit the harsh realities of the world outside.
They’re familiar. They’re special. They are some version of home.
If you’re lucky, the restaurant you choose as your own will offer stiff drinks, a hunk of beef bathed in a whiskey marinade and an ice cold plate of iceberg lettuce coated with Thousand Island dressing.
The Drover has been serving that special combination of care and flavor for nearly 50 years. That’s why it is beloved by locals. It is a destination for visitors. It is Omaha’s steakhouse, imprinted on our city’s past while at the same time barreling through the present, the most “Omaha” of Omaha steakhouses in 2025.
I will soon choose the best dishes we ate during the year of Steak Town USA, and there are many good ones. But I can already tell you what Omaha steakhouse I venture to the most when I’m off the clock, the place that feels most like my steakhouse home. It’s The Drover.
“Family-owned steakhouses make Omaha so special,” said Amy Leise, who co-owns the restaurant with her sister Wendy Anderson. “We have gone through so much change, and to be one of the surviving steakhouses and still be relevant and a place that people want to go means so much to us.”
They have been working here since they were girls, when their father, Robert Anderson, bought out his co-owner in the franchise restaurant that had stood there, renamed it The Drover and in the late ’70s opened a steakhouse that fit Omaha then and now.
On a recent Wednesday night, 48 years after it opened, the place was packed, as it is most every night. If you want a table, you’ll need a reservation.
The Drover’s dining room is rustic with its Old West details and cowboy kitsch. It’s dark and cozy. Diners eat their steaks by candlelight in between blonde brick arches and thick wooden beams, or belly up to the bar in a burgundy vinyl chair under the glow of rosy-warm light.
Every experience at The Drover begins with a whole loaf of warm wheat bread served with soft butter. The bread is a sort of honey wheat, with a hint of sweetness and a soft interior. I always go for an end piece.
Cocktails are a consistent B+. The Drover’s Manhattan is strong and simple, and I appreciate the brandied cocktail cherry. When I last wrote about the restaurant in 2018, the bar didn’t have Campari to make a Negroni, but that has since changed, and they make a solid sipper. The wine list is heavy on big California cabernets, and I often will order a glass from Hess, which I think pairs well with beef.
The shrimp cocktail we’ve tried this year as part of our Steak Town menu lineup has ranked either firm and flavorful or somewhat watery. The Drover’s is the former, served with a zippy cocktail sauce and a wedge of lemon. Their onion rings have a craggy, rough finish and a peppery seasoning. They are among the best we have eaten this year.
All dinners come with the choice of the salad bar or a soup. I’m sure I have never chosen the soup, because the salad bar — which the owners believe was the first in Omaha when it was constructed in 1968, when the place was still called The Cork ’n Cleaver – is still one of the city’s best.
It’s heavy with nostalgia: iceberg lettuce, pickled beets, boiled eggs, bacon bits. More recent additions, which the owners said many customers have requested, include several types of cheese, peas and mixed greens. I loaded up my cold metal plate with the old-school stuff, just like always. And I advise one tip: Don’t skip the roughly cracked peppercorns at the end of the bar, next to the croutons and sunflower seeds.
I likely ate this salad bar for the first time when Ronald Reagan was president.
Like so many other Omaha kids, I have memories built in steakhouses. I remember lunches at The Drover with my dad when I was a teenager, and later, in my 20s. I remember my parents going there on date night dinners, and wishing I could go.
And The Drover somehow feels everlasting to me, timeless without being tired.
And undeniably consistent.
Robert Anderson ran this place from the day it opened until his death in 2014. Then his daughters, Leise and Wendy Anderson, took over. For more than four decades, The Drover was co-managed by two men, Buddy Goodman and Mike “Spike” Sabin. Goodman and Sabin were, for decades, the faces that greeted regular customers into the restaurant. If you liked steak in Omaha enough to be a regular, you knew they held the keys to The Drover.
The sisters have remodeled a bit, spruced up parts of the restaurant, built a new bar and weathered both a fire that closed the restaurant for a year and then a global pandemic. There’s new electrical and plumbing now, sure, but the restaurant’s soul remains unchanged.
It’s well past time that we talked about that house whiskey marinade.
The Drover had a bone-in filet on the night we visited for our Steak Town review. If you tend to think a filet is too texturally soft, try this one. It’s often on the specials list, and may soon become a permanent fixture on the menu when the restaurant releases an updated one in 2026.
And of course I had that steak dipped in the whiskey marinade.
It wasn’t the owner, the managers or the chef who came up with the thing that The Drover is most known for, Wendy Anderson says. It was, in fact, a group of busboys who together dreamt up the original idea.
Though it has been tweaked over time, it has stayed remarkably close to the original. For decades, I thought the recipe was a secret. More recently, its mere two ingredients have been revealed.
Chef Pablo Vasquez, who has been cooking at The Drover for 25 years, said the marinade, made with soy sauce and whiskey, brings a dark, savory note to beef.
“It makes steak taste more like steak,” he said.
I agree with that simple description of the whiskey marinade’s enduring popularity. It brings a note of umami, a hint of saltiness and a dash of caramelized sweetness. Skipping the whiskey marinade is rare, it turns out. Vasquez estimated that about 95 percent of the steaks that come out of the small kitchen are flash dipped in the marinade just before being seared.
We also ordered the bone-in ribeye, which has the cut’s signature chew and ample fat that brings plenty of beefy flavor. While it’s always on The Drover’s menu, Leise said it’s not quite as popular as the ribeye without a bone, which is the best seller.
The restaurant has been working with the same boutique meat processor for 25 years. I asked who it was, but they chose not to say.
“We’re not gonna share that,” Leise said, chuckling. “That is a secret.”
The processor cuts only for The Drover and one other restaurant, in Las Vegas.
Anderson and Leise said the supplier gives special cuts and selections to the restaurant, and the steaks are cut each week and then wet aged for 28 days before being shipped to the restaurant. All the beef is sourced from within 250 miles of Omaha.
The baked potato is one of my favorites in the city. Nearly the same size as the filet, it is topped with a thick dollop of sour cream, plenty of bacon bits and chives. The skin, crispy and flavorful, paired with the potato’s tender interior make it a delicious contrast in texture.
It was an easy choice to select which Drover menu item I would judge as its specialty item.
I love the cinnamon toffee cheesecake, an unholy marriage between a cheesecake and a cinnamon roll. It’s made in two layers: the bottom a warm, cinnamony wedge and the top a cooler slice of cheesecake, both coated in crispy bits of cinnamon and toffee, finished with a dollop of whipped cream. It is impeccable, and the two of us absolutely crushed our slice. No regrets.
Nineteen years ago, I brought Matthew to The Drover on one of our first dates. It was, in fact, the first Omaha steakhouse we visited together.
I have often chosen The Drover for my birthday dinner (like I did when I was a kid, at Jerico’s). I love its underpinnings of nostalgia. Its timelessness. And how dialed in it is on serving all that plus a damn good filet — and a remarkably good hamburger, for the record. It is vibrant. Not stuffy or intimidating. Dining there is fun.
Slowly, two seats at The Drover bar have become one of mine and Matthew’s “spots.” It is a place where I returned as a grown-up version of that steak-loving kid and decided to make my own family memories.
And, for us, it simply makes sense. I was born the same year as The Drover. This does not feel like a coincidence.
And it’s also not a coincidence that Omahans love their steakhouses, and The Drover. At the end of our interview, Anderson and Leise and I started talking about the question at the heart of this series, our city’s continued fascination with steak — our belief that maybe, just maybe, that steak is simply better in Omaha.
“Wendy and I go everywhere, and we just, everywhere we go, we always smile and chuckle,” she said. “Omaha is a steak town.”