If your Instagram feed looks anything like mine, you get served A LOT of steak porn. And a good deal of it shows inconceivable cuts of Wagyu steak: a German butcher cutting an insanely marbled cube that looks like the most decadent thing one could possibly eat, or a Japanese chef placing a precisely sliced slab of an artistically marbled cut on a binchotan grill so you can hear the sizzle. This has always felt like pie in the sky stuff, social media fodder that I drool over from afar because if I tracked it down, it probably wouldn’t be anything like the highly manicured visuals. That was until I took a seat at San Francisco’s Niku Steakhouse, where it felt like my Instagram feed had come to life and all of my Wagyu dreams (and then some) came true.
I’ve been to steakhouses where there’s more than one Wagyu option, typically a combination of A5 (the fattiest, most common variety of Japanese Wagyu cattle), Australian and American Wagyu (the latter two are Wagyu breeds raised on farms in other countries). But after going to Niku — the crown jewel of SF’s mighty Omakase Restaurant Group — everything else felt like child’s play as I got hit with a crash course on the Wagyu spectrum.
A server brought out example pieces of four different cuts, ranging from A5, rarer A4 and A3 options, and the rarest of them all, a “Drunken Wagyu” that was raised on a farm adjacent to a sake brewery and fed spent sake grain. I’d never had beef like this. While A5 is widespread, Niku is one of one when it comes to stocking many A3 and A4 varieties. There are seldom-seen Wagyu cuts available here that you won’t find in any other restaurant in the country, and it’s the product of the Michelin-starred chef and madman butcher behind it all.
Before Niku received its own Michelin star, Executive Chef Dustin Falcon worked at three-starred The French Laundry in Napa County and two-starred Lazy Bear in SF. During service at Niku, he mans a three-part, crank-driven grill that uses live oak from California’s Central Coast for bigger hybrid and American Wagyu steaks; a smaller, extremely hot surface using Japanese binchotan charcoal for those rare Japanese Wagyu cuts; and a compressed charcoal grill for vegetables like maitake mushrooms that are cooked in — what else? — Wagyu fat. Sitting at one of the dozen or so counter seats gives you a front row look at Falcon’s take on the ancient ritual of man and fire.
Then there’s butcher Guy Crims, who runs The Butcher Shop by Niku next door and has been in the trade for 40 years. Both Crims and Falcon go to Japan every year on trips organized for distribution reps and find themselves the only restaurant people in the caravans visiting small family farms all over the country. It’s the relationships they build that make it so Niku is the only place in the United States that carries certain cuts.
“We buy more Japanese Wagyu as a restaurant than some A5 purveyors do,” Falcon says. “And the hard thing is that every farmer thinks they have the perfect method. They all have differentiators, but at the end of the day, you just have to taste it, like wine.”
There’s a harmony in the fine dining approach that Falcon brings to cooking with the more visceral butchery of Crims. The chef is tempered, focused on flawless execution, presentation and the complete experience of the 70-seat restaurant. The butcher, on the other hand, is a wild man. He loves Harleys, wears a custom-made bullhead ring on one finger and a skull on his pinky. He credits a spiritual trek to Mount Everest as his calling for becoming a Wagyu butcher, stocks a range of exclusive Wagyu cuts (like a Yamazaki whisky mash-finished Kobe) and his lunchtime butcher counter double smashburger — a 50/50 blend of domestic and Japanese A5 Wagyu — with Wagyu beef tallow fries is considered by many to be the best burger in the city.
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Chef Yama is waiting for you to pull up a chair. All you have to do is find him.“This is my dojo,” Crims says standing in the butchershop. “And I am the modern Cro-Magnon man. I go out into the world with my team and bring the mammoth back and divide that up with the tribe.”
Sitting down at Niku for dinner, we each get to pick our own knives from a selection that includes a spread of Spanish, Japanese and French steel (even a small cleaver!) that would make Hattori Hanzō jealous. My 44 Farms Prime NY Steak from Texas, rubbed with Falcon’s mixture of French sea salt, garlic, onion, paprika and celery, is easily the most well-executed steak I’ve had in years.
My table shares a Wagyu tasting of the Takamori Farms Drunken Wagyu and the Hasegawa Farms A3 Mother-Gyu. It’s rich with a melt-on-your-tongue umami with a savory lightness to it. The tasting is served with a dollop of fresh wasabi to cut through any extreme fattiness, but there’s a palpable balance to these cuts unlike the fat bomb I was expecting after robotically watching all of those Instagram videos. It’s sublime.
Cuts like those fatty cubes are typically A5 that sit higher on the Wagyu BMS index, or Beef Marbling Score. The scale goes from one to 12, with 12 being the highest; A5 cuts are typically in the eight to 12 range. Recent trips to Japan have made it possible for Niku to access and better understand more flavorful A4 and A3 cuts from cattle raised on easily digestible apple chips, spent grain and sake lees.
“The farms we liked the most are the ones where we can really taste the difference in the feed,” Falcon says. “Happy, well-fed cows are happier for us.”
Niku is a blissful place to be for a steak lover, a restaurant that has seemingly taken the Wagyu game more seriously than anyone else. Most of these breeds are available in America for the very first time, and you can go as all-in as you want from start-to-finish — whether it’s with the vast array of steak options or starters like Wagyu bone marrow and Wagyu charcuterie with pastrami, tri-tip jerky and pate with chicken liver that goes absolutely crazy. There’s even a Wagyu fat brownie for dessert with Wagyu caramel in case any boxes went unchecked. Any way you slice it, Niku is the ultimate Wagyu experience in the country.
“This is not a timid concept,” Crims says. “But at the end of the day, it’s about the love, care and respect of the animal and how the farmers we work with and those families steward the land. And if we don’t source the quality at the hunt, we’re not going to get people back at our table.”
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