PRIME TIME

For those who like their steaks rare—or ultrarare—a beef even more precious than Kobe is now on the menu at Wynn.

apan’s Hyogo Prefecture is home to the strictest beef grading rules on earth, standards that make the USDA scale of Choice, Select, and Prime seem amateurish by comparison. Inspectors grade each animal on five different variables, the most crucial one being the beef marbling standard. The Japanese are obsessed with marbling, and when Canadian food writer Mark Schatzker visited the country for a chapter in his book Steak, he described a quality

Jcut as “So fatty that ‘meat’ may no longer be the correct term for it… beef ornamented with wisps of fat that looked like crochet work, a pervasive filigree that reached into every nook of red muscle.” That is why beef from Japan is so prized worldwide, and in Hyogo they take this very seriously, because it’s the only place on earth where real Kobe beef can originate. Kobe is the most famous and expensive steak on earth. But because the name was never afforded trademark protection in the US, it is widely misused in restaurants, and an estimated 99 percent or more of all beef sold as Kobe in this country is not Kobe at all, or even Japanese. So little is exported that the Kobe Beef Association licenses individual restaurants and hotels to receive it. In the entire United States, only three such licenses have been granted: to restaurants in New York, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where it is held by Wynn. But the exotic and varied nature of Wynn’s beef program doesn’t