I had dinner at the group’s namesake restaurant, hoping to find A Bar N’s bavette steak, also known as sirloin flap (I now know I should have gone to the group’s restaurant Hestia for that cut), but I found a “Texas Wagyu ribeye” as the only steak on the menu that evening. The folks at A Bar N supply beef to the Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group. I recently had an odd Wagyu-related experience at an Austin restaurant. With A Bar N, he said, “We are finally getting back to what Texas was and should always be-producing great beef.” Back then, his out-of-state customers would tell him they were looking forward to trying famous Texas beef, and he had to give them the bad news that the steaks likely didn’t come from a Texas ranch. ![]() That prospect seemed impossible to him when he was still the chef at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, the restaurant he left to open Fearing’s in 2007. “We had this local ranch that was raising local Texas Wagyu,” he said. The story of A Bar N is also something Fearing was thankful to have as he worked the dining room. Katie Allen Bolner, chief marketing officer for the company, explained that “we waited until our quality was very consistent.” This is a great story about a partnership between a chef and a producer, but it also shows just how long it took A Bar N to increase its herd size to provide the steaks required for just one restaurant. Then in 2018, it added the steaks and the tenderloin to the nightly menu. ![]() The restaurant added strip steaks, ribeyes, and the occasional brisket the following year. They convinced him to stay for a taste, and Fearing’s began serving A Bar N Ranch tenderloins as a special soon after. ![]() They brought some beef along for a a meeting with a sous chef at Fearing’s, inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Uptown Dallas, and found chef Dean Fearing on his way out the door. That’s why you still can’t buy an A Bar N Ranch steak, fourteen years after the outfit began breeding Wagyu and Angus cattle in North Texas.Ī Bar N Ranch founders Gregg Allen and Van Nichols aimed high to secure their first restaurant partnership in 2014. One genetic modification in the breeding process can take several years to manifest in the offspring, and the rancher needs to hope it is a change for the better. Building a herd of cattle with specific genetics and replicating or improving upon them from one generation to the next requires patience. Not doing so would be bad business-unless your product is boutique beef. When customers want more of your product, you usually find a way to make more as quickly as possible to meet the demand.
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