Diverse Cuts
The steakhouse spread is arguably the most old reliable upscale meal in contemporary culinary history. The New York strip, the tenderloin fillet, and the rib-eye cuts, specifically, have been high-priced standbys for as long as white tablecloths have adorned your daddy and granddaddy’s favorite restaurants.
In recent years, however, the spotlight has softened on The Big Three. More of the working class are hankering for chef-driven meals, and the industry has catered to this demand by introducing the mainstream to alternate cuts of beef. Chefs nationwide have followed.
“I serve beef heart, calf liver, and beef kidneys because I’m tired of the ‘regular’ cuts,” said Chris Cosentino, who serves a non-traditional “head-to-tail dinner” at his Italian bistro, Incanto, in San Francisco. “Other parts on the animal taste great. They have the same underlying flavors but with different textures that allow people to experience the animal in a different way.”
While ambitious and passionate efforts in his restaurant, Cosentino’s lamb tongue with pickled grapes and fried rabbit’s ear admittedly aren’t where meat distributors have expanded their business. Cuts such as the Cali tri-tip, the hanger steak, and the flatiron have gained notoriety from coast to coast in the last five years, particularly on account of being more price-friendly than the Establishment’s cuts.
The price of meat has skyrocketed in the past five years, and “the smaller, mom-and-pop shops,” according to Todd Hatoff, president of Chicago distributor Allen Brothers, “have become more dependent on economical cuts.”
Thus, the industry’s response by utilizing as much cow for steak as possible.
“If you said ‘flatiron’ in the kitchen 15 years ago, they’d think it’s something you play golf with. Now it’s a well-known deal,” said John Paul Khory, corporate chef for the purveyor Preferred Meats. “The flavor is robust because it’s off the chuck. It’s also a quarter of the price [of a short loin]. So one chef orders some of these off-cuts, then other chefs get word and does the same. The next thing you know it’s on a T.G.I. Friday’s commercial.”
Like the flatiron, the tri-tip (found on the hip) and the hanger (near the flank) also have a high-moisture content with water-soluble proteins. In layman’s that means the pieces are naturally juicy, although the parts which the steak comes from are still pretty tough. Purveyors use processes such as marinade-injection and needling machines to give the beef its desired tenderness.
Of course, with a new generation of business brats wining and dining in the steakhouse venue, meat marketeers are getting clever on the higher-end of the spectrum, too.
The bone-in tenderloin isn’t anything new, but it has gained momentum recentlyamong elitist steakhouses for its luxurious profile. The tenderloin has always been sold as the best cut of beef out there, and, as one chef put it, “everyone wants a bone attached.”
At the Coach Grill in Wayland, Massachusetts, a 22-ounce porterhouse goes for a reasonable $28. For the same price, you can order a 14-ounce bone-in tenderloin. (Steakhouses such as Gibson’s in Chicago and Del Frisco’s in Dallas charge $50 or more for the same cut.) Some chefs have opined that this bone-in cut, albeit delicious, is nothing more than marketing gimmickry, a way to reinvent old school steakhouse product by giving it a new name and face on the same old plate.
But the old guard defends this bone-in cut as, if anything, a revival of the steakhouse tradition. The rib-eye and the strips are still the bread and butter of the business, said Beef trade magazine editor Joe Roybal, but not every meat purveyor would agree.
Ask Allen Brothers’ Hatoff what he thinks about the myriad off-cuts being sold nationwide. “People are using more parts of the animal successfully to better merchandise the carcass,” he said, “but you’d never get my granddaddy to do it.”
