Our Beef

Not all beef is the same. Here’s how to tell.

Walk into most grocery stores and the beef is graded, packaged, and priced by a system almost nobody explains. We’ve been buying, grading, and cutting beef at 700 Atlantic Street since 1946 — long enough to know that a customer who understands what they’re looking at buys better, cooks better, and eats better. So here’s the whole picture, plainly.

The USDA grading ladder

The USDA grades beef on one primary factor: marbling — the flecks and threads of intramuscular fat inside the muscle itself, not the fat around the edge. More marbling means more flavor, more tenderness, and more forgiveness if you overcook it a minute.

Eight grades exist. Three matter to you.

USDA Prime

The top grade. Roughly two to three percent of all graded beef in the country qualifies. It comes from young, well-fed cattle and carries abundant marbling — enough that you can see distinct webbing throughout the muscle. Prime is what steakhouses buy. It’s what we sell to customers cooking for an occasion.

USDA Choice

The workhorse of a good butcher counter. Less marbling than Prime, but still substantial, and Choice covers a wide band — the top of Choice is very close to Prime, and the bottom is closer to Select. This is where a butcher earns their keep. We buy from the upper end of Choice, which is why our Choice ribeye doesn’t taste like the Choice ribeye at a supermarket.

USDA Select

Leaner, with noticeably less marbling. It cooks up firmer and drier and needs help — a marinade, a braise, a careful hand on the heat. We rarely carry Select as steaks. When we do use it, it’s in applications where the cut’s character matters more than the marbling.

Below Select sit Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner. Those go into processed products, not butcher cases.

What marbling actually is

Marbling is intramuscular fat — fat deposited inside the muscle tissue rather than in a layer around it. It’s laid down slowly, over months, in cattle that are well fed and unstressed. You cannot add it after the fact and you cannot fake it.

When you cook a well-marbled steak, that fat renders — melts — and bastes the muscle from the inside. This is the entire reason a Prime ribeye tastes richer than a Select one. It’s not seasoning. It’s not technique. It’s fat doing what fat does.

The USDA scores marbling on a scale with names that sound like a Victorian novel: Practically Devoid, Traces, Slight, Small, Modest, Moderate, Slightly Abundant, Moderately Abundant, Abundant. Prime requires Slightly Abundant or better. Choice spans Small through Moderate. Select is Slight.

How we buy

We’ve bought from the same kind of supplier relationships for decades — the kind where you can call someone, ask what’s coming, and get a straight answer.

Our standards are simple and we don’t move on them. We buy upper-Choice and Prime for our steak case. We buy whole primals and break them down here, in this building, rather than accepting pre-cut portions from a distributor. That means the trim, the thickness, and the aging are ours to control, not someone else’s to decide.

Every cut in the case was broken down by a master butcher who has been doing it for twenty years or more. Dan has been a butcher for thirty-two years. Alfonso, twenty-five. Hector, ten. That’s not marketing — that’s the actual reason the ribeye is cut the way it is.

Wagyu, explained

Wagyu means “Japanese cow.” The four Japanese breeds — Japanese Black being the most common — are genetically predisposed to extraordinary intramuscular fat, far beyond what the USDA scale was built to measure.

Japanese Wagyu is graded on its own system. A letter (A, B, or C) scores the yield. A number (1 through 5) scores quality. Inside that, a Beef Marbling Standard score from 1 to 12 measures marbling specifically. A5 with a BMS of 10 to 12 is the top of the market and eats more like foie gras than like steak — rich enough that three or four ounces is a full portion.

American Wagyu is Japanese Wagyu genetics crossed with domestic cattle, usually Angus. It typically lands at BMS 6 to 9 — dramatically more marbled than USDA Prime, but with more of the beefy character American palates expect. For most people cooking at home, American Wagyu is the better eating experience and the better value.

We carry American Wagyu in select cuts. Ask at the counter what’s in.

Which grade for which occasion

Shop by grade