Ruth's Chris redux

As regular readers know, Ruth's Chris Steak House is my favourite steak house in HK.

One of the reasons for this is that, in my opinion, US steak is the best in the world (and yes, I have had wagyu beef from Japan - but more on that in a moment). The reason for this is that the beef flavour seems to be stronger with US beef than with beef from other countries. As I mentioned above, I have had wagyu beef once when I was in Japan. The texture was superb but, in my opinion, the beef flavour wasn't as strong as the beef flavour I got from US steaks.

Being such a fan of US steaks, you can imagine that I was very annoyed during the ban on US steaks in HK not that long ago. During this period Ruth's Chris used Australian beef instead of US beef and we stopped going to Ruth's Chris for a while as the flavour wasn't good enough in our opinion - we kept getting hung up on the fact that we were paying full price for what seemed like 2nd grade beef. Of course, it wasn't second grade beef - it just felt like it because it didn't taste as good as US beef.

Anyway, after the ban on US beef got lifted (again, a while ago now), Sarah and I rejoiced by going back to Ruth's Chris. However, despite the fact that US beef was back on the menu, when we ordered the New York Strip - the beef flavour that we remembered from US beef of old wasn't as strong. I have no idea why. Possibly its because US beef is now chilled before being imported (this is a guess - I have no idea if this is true or not).

Either way, it was very disappointing to me that US beef seemed to have lost its strong beef flavour. So you can imagine my delight to discover that US beef seems to finally be back!

Last night, on a whim, Sarah and I went back to Ruth's Chris. We hadn't had a steak in months and felt that it was okay to splash out seeing as it was Xmas. We went to the PP branch rather than our usual TST branch as it was closer to our office and we didn't want to travel all the way to TST East.

And the steak was fantastic.

We ordered one 16oz New York Strip to share between us and the beef flavour was very intense - very much back to the flavours that we used to enjoy so much when we ordered US beef in the past. I have to admit to a pang of regret that I didn't order 12oz for myself and was stuck with just my half of the steak amounting to a measly 8oz.

The problem I now have is - was last night a one off lucky occurrence or is US beef really back to its best? Also, how long can I resist before going back to find out for sure?