Where to Get Your Beef
Where to Eat Your Beef
Anyone in the local meat industry will tell you demand and appreciation for beef has evolved dramatically in recent years. For a long time, steak was just steak, pure and simple. People enjoyed it at home or in restaurants, with little if any attention to distinctions of quality or origin.
“I’ve been in the business since 1987, back when people didn’t even know what marbling was,” says Peter Fransen, manager of meat importer Saison. “They were happy to have anything from the supermarket.” Chris Mark, executive chef at BLT Steak, recalls that even as recently as 1996, when he first worked in Hong Kong, “it was almost impossible to get chilled beef; there just wasn’t enough demand for it.”
But over the past decade, there’s been a turnaround in education about meat quality. As they did with wine, affluent Hongkongers developed discerning attitudes toward steak quality after traveling around the world. At both middle-range and high-end restaurants in Hong Kong today, almost nobody orders a steak without at least checking its nationality.
The newfound demand for quality has become so attentive as to drive importers such as Oliver Win, managing director of Olivier Pacific, to seek out only top-notch beef reared with no antibiotics, no hormones, humane treatment and assured traceability of each cow back to its farm and parentage. Win, who imports US prime through Meyer Natural Angus, says that some local hotels now use laboratories to inspect on a microbiological level the beef they buy.