Wagyu restaurants in Cincinnati, Ohio

Cincinnati documents its Wagyu two completely different ways, and there are only two rooms doing it. Fifteen of its restaurants publish here and two clear the full sourcing standard, leaving thirteen that name the beef and stop there. Zero hold a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry, so neither verified room reaches the standard through Kobe.

One goes to Japan and one goes to Australia. The first runs a Miyazaki A5 programme and buys Grand Champion Miyazaki Citrus Wagyu at Japan's invite-only World Wagyu Auction, which is about as specific as a sourcing claim gets: a prefecture, a grade and a named competition lot. The second sells a dedicated Australian Wagyu line by the ounce, with a four ounce minimum on the filet, and prints a marbling score for it rather than leaving the word to do the work.

Buying by the ounce is worth understanding before you order. Highly marbled beef is rich in a way that makes a normal steak portion hard to finish, so a four ounce minimum is not a small serving, it is closer to the right one. It also lets a kitchen carry expensive beef without committing to a sixteen ounce cut, which is often why the option exists at all.

The gap between the two tiers is the thing to notice here. Three of the thirteen menu-claim rooms are steakhouses, including two of the most established names in the city, and they advertise Wagyu without publishing a prefecture, a grade, a breed status or a producer. That is not an accusation, since a kitchen can buy well and print nothing, but it does mean a reader comparing steakhouses in this city has documentation to go on at two of them and a single word at the rest. Both verified rooms price in the top tier; the menu-claim tail runs from two Japanese rooms at the cheapest tier the city offers up through a yakiniku counter, a Mexican kitchen and a downtown American room whose filet is graded A5 without naming where it came from.