Japan Premium Beef

This is a specialty butcher on Great Jones Street in NoHo, trading since 2009, where everything is cut to order at a walk-in counter. Its case is split between two Wagyu lines and the split is kept clean, which is the reason to trust the rest of what it says.

One line is Japanese A5 from Miyazaki, sold as ribeye and New York striploin. The other is Washugyu, which is a domestic product and is labelled as one. Plenty of shops sell both and let the Japanese line's language drift onto the domestic one. This one does not.

Washugyu is a specific programme rather than a generic term: Japanese Black crossed with American Black Angus, raised in Oregon, and graded on the American scale. The shop describes it at USDA Prime with a marbling score in the nines.

Two things follow, and both are useful. It is not Japanese beef, however Japanese the name sounds, so no A-grade applies to it and none is claimed. And it is a considered cross rather than a compromise: half Japanese genetics on an Angus base, fed long, grading at the top of the American scale. For a lot of cooking that is the more usable animal than A5, which is eaten in ounces.

The name is the trap, and it is the same trap as any Japanese word on domestic beef. Read where the animal was raised, which this shop tells you.

Buying here means the counter or a local delivery and pickup service; there is no national shipping. Everything is cut to order, which is the practical argument for a butcher over a box: you can ask for a thickness, and you can ask what is in the case today.

One navigational note. The shop moved next door on Great Jones Street some years ago, so an older address a couple of numbers off still circulates. The current one is the number to use.