Sausage Parties and Meat Ups: Portland's Best Steaks, Chops and Charcuterie

RingSide Steakhouse

2165 W Burnside St., 503-223-1513, ringsidesteakhouse.com.

RingSide is a multigenerational family shrine to wine and beef, a place where opulent marbling is a quality of the meat and not the countertop. There are occasional adventurous specials—a steak dish with chicharrón and watermelon comes to mind—but this is Portland's most classic baked-potato-side steakhouse, complete with a meat museum in the form of the pristine dry-curing room that is the envy of every other restaurant in Portland. RingSide's early and late happy hours, in the darkest bar ever invented, are legend—and include $4.75 steak bites.

El Gaucho

319 SW Broadway, 503-227-8794, elgaucho.com.

Dim, sepia-toned steakhouse El Gaucho remains a stirringly foreign experience below the Benson Hotel—a place where meticulously coiffed and tuxedo-vested servers make tableside Caesar salad ($14) for elegant arts patrons and West Hills scions with Kardashian hair. Flamenco plays nightly (including Beatles medleys), and a brigade of cooks sears aged steaks to perfection in a kitchen lit like a theater. For the big spender, a $74 filet mignon and lobster surf and turf is available topped with a note-perfect béarnaise. But the plebs can get that same beautiful sauce on Angus steak frites during happy hour for $18.

Old Salt Marketplace

5027 NE 42nd Ave., 971-255-0167, oldsaltpdx.com.

With its open timbers and roaring hearth fire, Cully butcher and sandwich shop Old Salt Marketplace hardly needs to advertise its devotion to old-school sourcing and nose-to-tail cooking. If any doubt remains after ogling the charcuterie in the deli case, enter through the supper-house curtains after 5 pm to enjoy meltingly tender roasted meats alongside an imaginative cocktail menu employing house-infused liquors. If you can't choose a single protein, go for the "let us cook for you" option—a meat-and-seafood omakase starting at $30 per person.

Grain & Gristle

1473 NE Prescott St., 503-288-4740, grainandgristle.com.

Old Salt might be the newish tent pole of Ben Meyer and Alex Ganum's meat empire, but this wood-grained gastropub is the Alberta neighborhood's old reliable, tucked away on Prescott Street. You can rarely go wrong with the daily twofer, which gets you a two-person entree and a pair of 12-ounce beers for $25. Otherwise, the lamb ($14)—slow-cooked, shredded and topped with spiced yogurt and chickpeas—should get the job done.