Wagyu restaurants in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Sioux Falls has two documented Wagyu rooms and they could hardly be less alike. Eleven of its restaurants publish here and two clear the full sourcing standard: a top tier steakhouse holding a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry, and a neighbourhood bar and grill where the Wagyu costs a fraction of that. One of the two carries the Certified Kobe badge, which needs the licence and Kobe on the menu we verified.

The steakhouse is the conventional half of the list. It holds the registry licence, had Kobe on the card when we last read it, and documents its Japanese beef by brand as well as by grade, so it earns the badge on both limbs rather than on the licence alone. It prices at the top tier, as very nearly every registry room in the country does.

The other is the more useful listing for most readers. It is a bar and grill in the lower half of the price range, and its Wagyu arrives as smash burgers made with beef from North 40 Beef, a fifth generation family farm in northeast Nebraska. That farm crosses registered Wagyu genetics onto Angus and says so in its own words, which is why a burger here documents its beef as precisely as a steak many times the price.

That contrast is the thing to take away. Documented Wagyu in this city is available at either end of a menu, and the format tells you nothing about whether the sourcing is written down. The nine remaining published venues advertise Wagyu without saying where it came from, and one of the eleven changes its menu often enough that we re-read it on a cycle rather than trusting an old reading.