At a time when everyone is obsessed with the freshness of ingredients, it may come as a shock to find that some of the steaks served at the InterContinental hotel's Steakhouse Bar + Grill are more than 35 days old. Rest assured, says executive chef Graham Burst, the dry-aged beef is not only laboratory-tested and safe for consumption, it makes for a superior meal.
This month, Burst began offering four types of dry-aged steaks at the restaurant: Canadian porterhouse and prime rib, US striploin and Japanese wagyu. For now, these are all off-the-menu items, carefully introduced by the restaurant manager to each guest.
'If you're a serious steak-lover, then dry-aged is the only way to go, but it is an acquired taste,' says Christopher Mark, the chef of 11-month-old Italian steakhouse Bistecca, who also sources meat for Dining Concepts' three other steakhouses: Craftsteak, BLT Steak and Prime.
At present, Bistecca is the only Dining Concepts restaurant with on-premise facilities to dry-age meat.
'The best way to put it is that dry-aged beef tastes 'beefier'. But that's not something Hongkongers are used to,' Mark says. 'When I arrived here in 1996, most steakhouses were serving frozen steaks, which had barely any flavour and were just a blank canvas for sauce.
'Fifty or sixty years ago, dry-ageing was the only way people enjoyed their steaks. Back then, most of the beef was grass-fed and not as tender, so you had to dry-age the steaks. But farmers eventually [bred] their cows for more tender meat. Nowadays, people are so used to these meats melting in their mouth, they don't even want to chew their steaks any more. There needs to be a change in mentality. Just because the meat has some texture doesn't mean it's tough.'
