Stonegrill

Looking back over my blog, I find it hard to believe that I've never talked about Stonegrill before.

If you have never been to a Stonegrill (or a steakhouse of similar style), then you are really missing out on a fairly unique way of eating steak. When you order a steak from Stonegrill, it comes to the table in raw form on top of a superheated stone which you use to grill the steak at the table. In practice, you tend to cut off small pieces of meat as those small pieces cook relatively quickly allowing you to slowly eat up the steak piece by piece.

As an early birthday celebration for the missus, we went to a Stonegrill last night and ordered the deluxe dinner set. This basically consisted of a range of 4 different types of steak with Angus steak at the "low" end before moving up to shortrib and two types of wagyu beef at the high end. Which was pretty good as it gave us the opportunity to compare and contrast the textures and flavours of the different types of beef.

The Angus Steak was probably what you would normally think of as steak - relatively lean with a full body flavour. The shortrib had a very distinct flavour and texture. I'm not sure how you would describe the flavour but if you have had it before, you would definitely recognise it. What makes the shortrib stick out though is the slightly chewy texture which you get from the tendon. Last of all is the wagyu beef which is highly marbled with fat and as a result, almost melts in your mouth. Even across the two types of wagyu beef that we had (which were classed as M6 and M9), there was a clear difference in both texture and look as the M9 clearly had more fat content.

In some ways though, the ordinary Angus Steak was my favourite. Although the wagyu beef tasted nice, the flavour goes very quickly and doesn't last as long. The Angus Steak on the other hand, has more lean meat in it which means that you spend more time chewing the meat which ultimately results in the flavours of the steak remaining in your mouth much longer. And as you should know, all your taste buds are in your mouth, which means that the full body flavour of the Angus Steak is able to come out stronger after chewing it for a while.

Naturally your mileage may vary and its always good to mix things up, but the classic New York Strip remains my favourite cut of meat.