Midway through the meal at Bend’s Bos Taurus, the server invites us to choose our weapon. She brings a wooden box to the table and describes the three types of steak knives within—French, Japanese, and American, each boasting attributes like folded Damascus steel or a full tang, horn handles or provenance from the maker of samurai swords. It’s awfully fancy for Central Oregon. 

More than personalization, the knife ritual signals that steak is to be taken seriously in this 44-seat restaurant in downtown Bend. Launched in 2017, the restaurant brings fine dining from a chef who’s cooked in New York City’s fanciest kitchens, from Le Bernadin to Per Se. People told George Morris that it “was gonna be way too high-end for Bend, and I found that really encouraging,” he says. “And I’m not being sarcastic.”

After all, Bend was a beer town. The Central Oregon vacation center stands between Mount Bachelor skiing and Sunriver golf courses. It’s the place that birthed Deschutes Brewing and then two dozen other successful breweries after that. But the Pacific Northwest population booms (and later pandemic shifts) have turned the city into a bustling enclave of high earners, and now the dining scene has risen with the housing prices.

The leisurely, attentive service at Bos Taurus may be its hallmark, but steak stands at the center. Morris tried meats from more than 20 ranches before making his selection, eventually splitting the menu between domestic cuts (a filet, New York strip), wagyu hybrids from Idaho or Australia, and premium Japanese wagyu, the last priced by the ounce.

Most diners recognize wagyu beef as upscale; not as many know why. Bred for the fat that marbles the meat with texture and flavor, Japanese wagyu is graded by that marble, with A5 standing as the top score. Which is not to impugn the quality of, say, an A2 cut; Morris calls the Akaushi A2 on the menu his favorite, hailing from Hyogo Prefecture, the part of Japan home to the city of Kobe. A two-ounce portion is served in nine slim slices with elegant tweezers for cutlery. Each bite is firm and rich, as if the flavor of steak were distilled to its purest form.

Morris notes that about 80 percent of tables try at least a little wagyu, with some folks even ordering a 12-ounce portion (a splurge at $21 to $45 an ounce). But most pair a wagyu taster with a hybrid or domestic steak, plus classic sides like creamed spinach. The hybrids pair wagyu marbling with more beefiness, the “robust flavor you think of when you think of steak.”

At launch, the restaurant played it on the predictable side, but seven years later Morris isn’t afraid to throw lamb neck or raw fish on the menu with his beef. Meals start with towering popovers, a remnant of Morris’s childhood memory of dining at the basement Neiman Marcus restaurant in Chicago with his mother when she dragged him shopping.

Morris has seen the Bend dining scene evolve, easily accepting his fine dining concept—though it helps that the small, two-story space is casual enough that shorts and flip-flops fit in as well as a three-piece suit. Despite the price point, he says, “somehow, nobody looks out of place. And I would hope that nobody feels out of place.”

The calm of tiny Bos Taurus, a downtown shrine to steak, would be quickly drowned out by the din at Rancher Butcher Chef. In its airy open-kitchen space in a wealthy west Bend neighborhood, the restaurant invites congeniality with a long chef’s counter, bar, and crowd of tables.

With all its exposed-bulb light fixtures and exposed-beam ceiling, the industrial-
chic dining room wouldn’t be out of place in downtown Portland, and indeed its roots began in that city. John and Renee Gorham built a restaurant mini-empire in the city including Toro Bravo, Tasty n Alder, and Shalom Y’all but shuttered or sold them in 2020 due to a combination of Covid closures and the fallout from a series of antagonistic online posts by John that promoted vigilante actions and made transphobic remarks. After apologizing for the posts, the couple eventually made their way to Bend for a new start, with Renee largely handling the public role.

They paired with Will von Schlegell, whose family owns a ranch in Fort Klamath to the south, and launched the steakhouse in 2022. RBC has even more steaks on the menu than Bos Taurus—over a dozen—but despite the aging steaks inside glass cases in the entryway, steak isn’t necessarily the star. Here the service is breezier, less of a deep dive into the differences between the cuts. That’s even with types unfamiliar to many aficionados, like the tender teres major or txuleton, which hails from Spain. The single wagyu sits in the same lists as the other steaks.

Here the draw is the energy, the shared plates, the sweet kick of a bacon-wrapped date to start (pulled from one of the Gorham’s Portland menus). Sharable sides aren’t as laser focused on supporting a beef entree; the mustard-heavy creamed cabbage would match a pork sausage better than a porterhouse. Even with a sizable dining room, reservations are required, and the restaurant won the local Source Weekly’s restaurant of the year title.

With interest in a wider range of flavors, it’s no surprise that the ownership opened a spinoff, Bar RBC, in June—directly next door to Bos Taurus. The location is a fluke, says Renee Gorham, and the new joint will pull from their affinity for Spain, first explored in Portland’s Toro Bravo. “We are definitely not doing a steakhouse right next to a steakhouse,” she says. “We didn’t move to Bend to compete with Bos Taurus.” They hope to cultivate a party atmosphere with tapas—though that Rancher Butcher Chef abbreviation is still in the name.

What the two restaurants share is sky-high expectations for Central Oregon’s budding dining culture. “Bend is so ripe to be a great food city,” Renee says. “Feels like Portland in ’07, in a way.” With a combo of sun, snow, and a million outdoor sports, the town undoubtedly more than big enough for two beef-forward eateries. No jokes about Bend steaks being too rare, thank you very much.