Wagyu restaurants in Boulder, Colorado

Boulder documents more of its Wagyu than Denver does, and it does so in a city a tenth the size. Ten of its restaurants publish here and four clear the full sourcing standard, which is more documented rooms than the state capital manages and a far higher share of the local list: four of ten here against three of twenty-six there. Zero hold a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry.

Not one of the four is a steakhouse, which is the first useful thing to know. The Wagyu here sits on a Spanish menu, an Italian one and two contemporary American ones, so a diner looking for documented beef in this town should not be looking for a chophouse. Three of the four price at the top tier and the fourth sits just below it.

Three of the four name a Japanese prefecture outright. A long-standing dining room in the foothills above town runs two separate prefectures on one menu, Miyazaki and Kagoshima, each with its A5 grade attached, which is uncommon anywhere and rarer still outside a Japanese restaurant. A Friuli-inspired room downtown sells Miyazaki A5 as a supplement by the ounce, two or four, which is the format that turns a three-figure price per pound into a single orderable course. The third serves its Japanese beef on hot stone.

The fourth goes the other way and has the shortest supply line of any room in the state. A woodfired American kitchen on the Pearl Street Mall serves a tartare made with 7X Beef, a fullblood herd at Hotchkiss on Colorado's Western Slope that is listed on this site in its own right. Fullblood means the whole pedigree traces to Japan with no crossbreeding, the strongest breed claim an American producer can make, and eighteen rooms in this entire directory carry that badge. The six remaining published venues advertise Wagyu without documenting where it came from.