On a Tuesday around 6 p.m., the bar at Burch Steak is doing what good bars do: filling up faster than the dining room, with people who planned to stay an hour and will stay three. The lighting is low enough to be flattering, high enough to actually read the menu, and someone nearby is on their second glass of something from a wine list that takes itself seriously without being punishing about it.
So: is Burch Steak worth the fuss? The honest answer is it depends on which version of the place you’re visiting. There are two of them, sort of. Downstairs is the steakhouse — white-tablecloth-adjacent, the kind of room where a $68 dry-aged ribeye feels like a reasonable conversation to have with yourself. Upstairs is the pizza bar, where the same kitchen sends out some of the better bar food in the city for roughly a third of the price. Both are operated by chef Isaac Becker, whose earlier work at 112 Eatery made him a quiet institution in Minneapolis dining. Burch is shinier, more polished, but the cooking still has that same deliberate quality — nothing on the plate that doesn’t need to be there.
The steaks are the draw downstairs, obviously. They source well, they age it themselves, and they don’t apologize for the prices. A bone-in New York strip runs around $60-70 depending on the season, the sides are sold separately (the roasted carrots with pistachios are worth ordering even if you think you don’t care about roasted carrots), and the wine program is genuinely good rather than just expensive. If you’re celebrating something, or someone else is buying, this room delivers without being theatrical about it.
Upstairs, though, is where I’d tell most people to start. The pizzas come out of a wood-burning oven and have that proper char on the bottom — not the performative, slightly-raw-in-the-middle kind some places get away with. The tomato-and-fennel sausage version is the one to order. The bar itself carries serious cocktails and a rotating selection of natural and low-intervention wines, and the whole thing has the energy of a place that’s been figured out. Happy hour runs on the earlier side — check before you go — and the bar seats are first come, first served.
Burch sits on the corner of West Lake and Hennepin in the Uptown neighborhood, which means parking is its own small project. Street spots exist if you time it right; otherwise the surface lots nearby are your best option. It’s a reasonable walk from several bus lines if you’re coming from elsewhere in the city.
Reservations for the steakhouse downstairs are strongly recommended and easy enough to make online. The pizza bar upstairs is walk-in, which is part of the point. Go at 5:30 if you want a seat without negotiating for it. Go at 7:30 if you don’t mind standing at the bar, which, depending on your mood, can be the better outcome anyway.
The fuss, to return to the original question, is mostly warranted. Burch is not trying to be everything to everyone, and it’s better for it. The steakhouse is a proper steakhouse. The pizza bar is a proper pizza bar. Pick the one that fits your wallet that night, and you’ll leave feeling like the city has more going on than you sometimes give it credit for.
