Steak Review

Introduction to Steak

In researching this report, we found more than a dozen steak reviews. Some tests include more than 100 cuts of pricey beef and panels of professional chefs while other reviews amount to little more than a handful of steaks mail-ordered, cooked and tasted by one unabashedly carnivorous reviewer.

We found the best reviews of steaks in publications that sample five or more brands in blind taste-tests. The top sources, Cook's Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports, taste steaks from both mail-order sources and supermarket chains in a variety of price categories. Cook's Illustrated is the only publication that reviews four different cuts of beef: porterhouse, strip, tenderloin and filet mignon. The Wall Street Journal tests New York strip, porterhouse and Kobe-style beef (also known as Wagyu). Although Slate.com excludes supermarket brands from its steak reviews, it does a good job rounding up beef of various types, including grass-fed, "natural" and dry-aged. Slate's Mark Schatzker says that he ordered rib-eyes from the "best suppliers [he] could find," but he omits some of the top names in steak: Lobel's and Peter Luger's. Not only are steaks from these purveyors highly rated in comparative reviews, each has been in the meat business for more than 100 years.

We read a small number of steak reviews that focus on a single category of beef, such as grass-fed, natural or Kobe-style. Reports on grass-fed and natural beef are informative, but the quality and texture of grass-fed beef can be inconsistent, so it's hard to know whether the steak you receive will be tender or tough. And although no one could fail to be impressed by David Rosengarten's diligence in rounding up and tasting more than 100 cuts of Kobe-style beef (where cows are often massaged daily and fed sake), Kobe beef is ultra expensive and may be out of reach for the average steak buyer.

Mail-order steak is a luxury food, and, as such, it commands a high price. Yet reviews say that some steaks are not worth the cost. Omaha Steaks is the most popular and heavily advertised purveyor of mail-order steaks, and yet Omaha meats do not earn the highest ratings in any of the reviews we read. Paul Lukas' review in Money magazine gets right to the point: "While Omaha pioneered the category, it's not a premium vendor." Cook's Illustrated, meanwhile, pans Omaha meat's regular boneless strip as "thin" and "grainy," and the company's Private Reserve strip fares even worse, earning comments like "tough," "stringy" and "chewy." No reviewer rates Omaha beef as the best mail-order steak.