Lake Lanier Dinner Guide: Where to Eat After the Lake

A day on Lake Lanier takes more out of you than it feels like at the time. Sun coming off the water, wind, a few hours of hauling somebody up onto a tube, and by five o'clock the cooler is warm and nobody in the boat wants to cook. That is the moment this guide is for. The lake's northern end runs right up to Gainesville, and CHR Steak sits in the middle of downtown at 126 Bradford St NE, a short drive from the ramp and worth the change of clothes.

Gainesville is the lake's dinner town

Lake Lanier covers roughly 38,000 acres and 692 miles of shoreline across five counties, which is a polite way of saying it is easy to spend an entire day out there and end up hungry a long way from your own kitchen. Gainesville is the closest thing the lake has to a dining room. Don Carter State Park, the only state park on Lanier, sits here on the northern shore, and the city's own lake parks and the Olympic venue put in on this end of the water too.

Explore Gainesville keeps a good rundown of what there is to do on the lake, from the canoe and kayak club at Lake Lanier Olympic Park to the public ramps scattered around the shoreline. Our part starts when that part ends: boat on the trailer, sunscreen washed off, table waiting downtown.

Downtown itself is part of the appeal. The historic square is a few steps away, the streets around it are easy to walk once you have eaten, and parking is straightforward, so a lake day can turn into a proper evening without anyone getting back in the truck.

Time it around happy hour

Dinner runs Tuesday through Sunday from 5 to 10 PM, and happy hour runs Tuesday through Sunday from 4:30 to 6 at the bar. A lake day tends to wind down right into that window, which makes the early seat the easy call. Come in at five, take a stool while the room fills, and let the pace of the evening reset from boat time to dinner time.

The happy hour list is short and built for exactly this. Crab arancini with blue crab and pecorino risotto, oysters with mignonette and charred lemon, beef tallow fries with parmesan and garlic, and the wedge, caesar, and chopped char salads. There is a wagyu blade burger with those fries if someone wants dinner to be simple, lamb lollipops if they do not, and a daily fish feature from the kitchen.

The bar is worth sitting at for its own sake. There is a wall of bottles behind it, a full wine list, and a cocktail program that runs from the Ritz Spritz and the Smoked Paloma on the lighter end to the Old World CHR and the Oaked, both served in a smoked glass. If someone in the group is not drinking, the non-alcoholic beers are on the list too. You can look the whole thing over on our menu before you come in.

A word about what to wear

This is the one thing worth planning around. CHR keeps a smart casual dress code, so the swim trunks and the damp t-shirt need to stay in the truck. It is not a jacket and tie room, but it is a room people dress for, and the meal is better on the other side of a shower and a clean shirt. Build twenty minutes into the drive back for it and the whole evening lands differently.

Start cold, from the raw bar

After a hot day the first thing that tastes right is something cold. Oysters on the half shell arrive with cocktail sauce and a fresno shishito chili mignonette. There is a shrimp cocktail with charred lemon. And if the boat was full and everyone is in, the Sea Tower is the one that stops the conversation: oysters, prawns, domestic shrimp, snow crab, king crab, and Maine lobster, built to be worked through slowly by a table of people who have been in the sun since ten in the morning.

Then the part you drove here for

On the way to your table you pass the dry-age room, prime beef hanging behind glass under low light. It is usually the moment somebody in the group changes their mind about what they were going to order.

The steaks come two ways. The wet-aged USDA Prime and wagyu side covers the 15 ounce ribeye, the 8 ounce filet, the 12 ounce spinalis, the 12 ounce bone-in filet, the 15 ounce wagyu strip, and the 32 ounce tomahawk. Alongside it we run in-house dry-aged USDA Prime, aged behind glass for four weeks at a minimum and cut to order as a porterhouse, cowboy ribeye, or T-bone. If you have never had the two styles side by side, here is what those weeks of aging actually do.

How you build the plate matters as much as which cut you pick. A few ways a lake table tends to go:

• Order one 32 ounce tomahawk for two and let everyone else keep working the raw bar.
• Take a dry-aged cut and ask what came out of the room that day, because the answer changes.
• Add seared scallops, a lobster cake, or gulf shrimp on top of any steak.
• Pick a butter or a sauce: truffle, calabrian chili, black garlic herb, bearnaise, chimichurri, or bone marrow butter.
• Pass the sides down the table, starting with the lobster truffle mac and cheese and the beef tallow fries.

If you want the longer version of that, we wrote a full guide to ordering steak: cuts, temperatures, and what to put on top.

The lake takes the whole day out of you. Dinner is where you get some of it back.

For the people who are not eating steak

Not everyone comes off the water wanting beef, and the chef's menu is built so nobody has to settle for a side salad. There is sea bass with a reggiano crust and cauliflower puree, salmon with wasabi mash and caviar, seared scallops over whipped purple sweet potato, a squid ink shrimp linguini, lamb chops with parsnip puree, and sous vide Springer Mountain chicken. There is also a rotating wild game list with elk, venison, bison, and pork tomahawk, which is its own kind of North Georgia dinner and has a guide of its own.

When the boat holds more than four

Lake weekends have a way of turning into ten people at dinner. If the group has outgrown a normal table, the Executive Suite is our private dining room and seats up to 28 with its own service, which suits family reunions, birthdays, tournament dinners, and the last night of a week on the water. Mondays, when the dining room is closed, are held for private events by reservation.

If Gainesville is becoming a habit rather than a once a summer trip, two more things are worth knowing. The Blade Club is for regulars who take the steak program seriously, and the events calendar carries our live music nights and wine dinners, which are a good reason to come back into town long after the boat is put away. For a slower version of the same evening, with two people instead of ten, our downtown Gainesville date night guide covers the walkable one.

Book it before you launch

Here is the piece of advice that saves the whole day: make the reservation in the morning, before the boat goes in. Signal gets thin out on the water, tables fill up on summer weekends, and nothing sours a good day faster than four sunburned people circling downtown at seven o'clock. Reservations are highly recommended, walk-ins are welcome at the bar when there is room, and there is free parking around the square, though if you are still towing, plan on dropping the boat somewhere first.

Reserve your table on OpenTable, or call (678) 696-5111, and give the end of your lake day somewhere worth driving to.