Diner’s Diary | Why this wagyu on Hong Kong plates tastes different: herd’s chocolate diet
South Australian premium beef producer includes 2kg of Cadbury’s milk chocolate, and Allan Candy gummy worms and bears, in steers’ daily feed, producing meat that lacks the oily taste of some wagyu cuts
At Hong Kong restaurant 8 ½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana, the menu features a 1.2kg bone-in ribeye steak.
It’s an impressive HK$1,500 slab of beef, grilled to perfection, but it’s the taste that has many diners coming back for more.
The meat is marbled, but not to the extent that it has the distinctly oily taste of some wagyu beef, and packed with flavour.
The quality of the soil, water, pasture and grain on the cattle station in South Australia from whose herd the beef at the three-Michelin-star restaurant comes has a lot to do with it, but there’s a (hitherto) secret ingredient in the steers’ diet: sweets. To be precise, 2kg a day of (Australian) Cadbury’s milk chocolate and Canadian Allan Candy – everything from gummy worms to gummy bears.
Scott de Bruin, managing partner of Mayura Station, puts the sweet diet in perspective: the cattle weigh 700kg, as much as a car, so it’s the equivalent of a person eating a chocolate bar a day.
