

As a new generation of chefs reinterprets traditional steak tartare, Oliver Strand dissects the dish of the moment.
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Opinions vary on the proper method of preparing tartare—cut by hand or passed through a meat grinder. The Art of Shaving 5/8" Blade Grenadille Dark Wood Straight Razor, $320; theartofshaving.comPhotographed by Eric Boman, Vogue, November 2014

Some classics are untouchable, so sacred they could fall under the protection of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Laguiole corkscrew with a bone handle, the Dark and Stormy, the Vans lace-ups you wear on weekends: There’s little point in trying to improve on perfection. Other classics are more agile and can be refashioned—or even completely reimagined—while keeping their pedigree. For years, steak tartare fell in the first category; now it belongs in the second. A dish that spent a few quiet decades on the menus of steak houses and French restaurants, tartare appealed to a sophisticated kind of adult who knew where to find his or her pleasure. Raw meat bound with raw egg, it was a rite of passage that often arrived with a push: Chances are, somebody more worldly first persuaded you to try it.

And it generally hewed to a basic recipe—one taught in culinary schools in the United States and Europe. Chopped or ground meat is mixed with something flavorful (mustard, Worcestershire, Tabasco), something crunchy (capers, cornichons, shallots), something colorful (chives, parsley, scallion). One version might have a pinch of cayenne, another a splash of cognac. When he was still in the kitchen at Les Halles, Anthony Bourdain added a dab of ketchup, which is more traditional than you might think (“Les Halles, the restaurant, was pretty much created to serve this dish,” Bourdain has written). These are all minor variations, like singing a Cole Porter standard and holding a note for an extra beat. But something shook loose in recent years as the dish entered the repertoire of a new generation of chefs who don’t run steak houses or French restaurants. Tartare became less a fixed set of flavors than a structure. Few dishes are as open to interpretation or such an adept vehicle for a chef’s creativity. And that’s why you’ll see it on the menu of so many of the most interesting restaurants today.

At Annisa, the Michelin-starred restaurant in downtown Manhattan, chef Anita Lo’s is spiced with cinnamon; at Joule in Seattle, chef Rachel Yang’s is inspired by yook hwe, a raw-beef dish from Korea, with ginger, chile, garlic, pickled mustard seeds, and pickled Asian pears. “It’s served with a cod-roe aioli that’s briny and spicy and adds that creaminess,” Yang says. “You always taste a dish before you serve it, and I love tasting this dish.”

In New York, you could go out to eat tartare every day for a month and never encounter the same preparation twice. Au Za’atar, a Middle Eastern bistro in the East Village, serves Kibbe Naya, a traditional dish of raw lamb with scallion and mint. (“Whereas tartare is chopped by hand, the ultimate kibbeh nayyeh is pounded in a marble mortar with a large wooden pestle,” explains the cookbook author Anissa Helou. “However, very few people do it this way nowadays.”) The tartare at Takashi in the West Village is meltingly tender and slightly sweet, a delicate pile of hand-cut strips of domestic wagyu dressed with soy sauce, garlic, sesame oil, chile, Korean miso, and other ingredients that chef Takashi Inoue politely declines to disclose. At Carbone, the high-end Italian-American throwback in Greenwich Village where the waiters look like they could have been in the tracking shot in GoodFellas, the off-menu tartare is presented in a crock with a layer of anchovy emulsion on the bottom, pickled pearl onions and curly parsley on top. If you want to try it, order the porterhouse for two, and tell your waiter that you want the filet trimmed out and chopped up.

A tour of New York tartares requires you to visit M. Wells Dinette in Long Island City, Queens. Simply put, it serves one of the best steak tartares in the country.

M. Wells Dinette is the second act for Hugue Dufour and Sarah Obraitis. The couple first opened the original M. Wells in a diner a few blocks away. It was a polarizing restaurant—the always-brilliant food was impossible to categorize (battered sweetbreads fried General Tso–style and served in a hot-dog bun), the jammed room taxing and hectic. It closed after a year.

M. Wells Dinette is more polished and poised than the old diner, but it’s still strange and not quite like any other restaurant in the city: odd hours (open noon to 6:00 p.m.), odd days (closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays), odd location (it’s inside PS1, the contemporary-art institute affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, and if you tell the cashier at the admission desk where you’re going, you’ll be given a silver sticker with a rabbit on it that lets you in for free). PS1 is in a former public school built in the nineteenth century, and most of the restaurant’s seats are classroom desks facing the kitchen. Go to lunch with a friend and you’ll likely be seated shoulder to shoulder; the desks have pencils and pads of paper for passing notes.
In June, I had a tartare that was as bright and refreshing as a summer soup. I ordered one, devoured it, and ordered another. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d done that.

The dish was raw beef mixed with pickled mustard seeds, wild spring garlic, and smoked capers, topped with a raw egg, shaved horseradish, and wood sorrel under a layer of crisp crackers (which was just day-old bread sliced thin and baked with olive oil). The plate was smeared with a parsnip puree that managed to be rich and light and sweet all at once. It respected tradition, but the dish was an original.

That tartare isn’t on the menu anymore, because no tartare is on the M. Wells Dinette menu for long. Since opening in the fall of 2012, the dinette has served six or seven variations—Dufour isn’t sure of the exact number. “It can evolve,” he said. “This one is completely rethought because we were fed up before. Once the initial magic is lost, then you stop paying attention. That’s when we change it.” I asked Dufour and his head chef, Aidan O’Neal, what they thought might be in the dish in the fall. They couldn’t guess.

It doesn’t matter. I’ll go back, then again later in the season, and at least once more before the end of the year. Every time they get fed up making one tartare, I will be there to try the newest edition.

Contrary to what some might tell you, steak tartare is not named for the Tatars, the nomadic people who made such a strong impression in the fifteenth century and who were always in such a rush they supposedly ate their meat raw. In fact, steak à la tartare was named for sauce tartare, a mixture of raw egg, chopped hard-boiled egg, herbs or chives and shallots (or both), maybe cornichons and capers, plus a touch of vinegar and salt and pepper. Sometimes the raw egg was kept loose, and sometimes it was emulsified with oil to make a mayonnaise (which devolved into the little paper cup of mayo and relish that seafood restaurants call tartar sauce). You don’t see the original sauce tartare much these days, but you do come across its close relative, sauce gribiche, which also calls for chopped egg, herbs, mustard, vinegar, oil, and shallots and is served cold.

Sauce tartare was popular in the nineteenth century and could be served with any number of dishes—according to Larousse Gastronomique, these could include fish, oysters, breaded calves’ feet, raw beef, and raw horse meat. At some point, the sauce of steak à la tartare was incorporated into the meat, and the new arrangement was called beefsteak à l’américaine or filet américain. Exactly when this happened is a source of debate. According to one account, the first filet américain was invented by Joseph Niels in 1926, who started serving it at his restaurant Le Canterbury in Brussels. (The establishment’s descendant, Au Vieux Saint Martin in Brussels, opened by Niels’s son Albert in 1968, is a temple to modernist furnishings and offers what it considers to be a historically accurate filet américain.) The dish swept across Belgium and France, but it wasn’t until the postwar years, when American tourists swarmed Europe, that tartare became widely fashionable.

When we think of a traditional steak tartare, that archetypal mound of meat with the raw egg on top, we’re picturing a dish from the 1950s.

The tartare at chef Christian F. Pu­gli­si’s wine bar and bistro Manfreds & Vin in Copenhagen is a nod to that historic tartare—it hits all its marks—but it’s distinctly contemporary, less a layering of ingredients than a collision of vivid colors and textures. It grabs your attention. Pu­gli­si, who also runs the Michelin-starred Relæ across the street, calls it tartare because the name is comforting and familiar, “but it’s really a small bowl of raw meat. It has this rustic feel to it, and it’s brutal, no? It’s raw. It’s basic,” he tells me over the phone. “That dish created Manfreds. For me, it made me understand what the restaurant should be.”

He didn’t set out to invent a new tartare. Instead, he was intrigued by what his kitchen learned making charcuterie. They first salt the beef, then chill it in a blast freezer for no more than one hour—until the meat is cold and firm but not yet frozen—then they pass it through a grinder. (Dufour at M. Wells Dinette also uses a grinder.) The process changes the texture. The meat is tender, but it’s not mushy, and it has the deep red color of tuna belly. “The knife is the romantic approach, but I think if you handle the meat when you cut it, you warm it up,” Pu­gli­si says. A meat grinder with a sharp blade and a good motor that provides slow, steady rpms not only cuts cleanly, it can handle tough cuts such as the leg—which Pu­gli­si uses for tartare—turning muscles you would need to braise or roast into pieces so tender you could eat them with a spoon. “Because of our technique, we can use more flavorful meat.”

Puglisi’s presentation is simple. The meat is placed on a bed of young cress and a dollop of what he calls an “egg cream”—lightly poached eggs blended with bread crumbs, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper—and topped with crumbled rye-bread toasts. Flavor, texture, color: It’s all there, but it’s a dish that has been unmoored from history, reduced to its essentials.

There’s a third tartare that haunts me, the one Uruguayan chef Ignacio Mattos serves at Estela in New York. The dish is deceptively complicated—I didn’t realize just how much went into it until I met up with Mattos at his restaurant’s marble bar on a recent afternoon.

Reimagining New York Restaurant Estela’s Beef Tartare Recipe

The order matters. “If you change the assemblage, it has a completely different mouthfeel,” Mattos says. “We were very loose at first, but then you realize that the mouthfeel is broken if you don’t respect a certain order.” He wants the salt, chile flakes, and fish sauce to season the meat, but then he adds the olive oil to keep the lemon juice and vinegar on the surface where they can better wake up the palate. Do it the other way around, and you’ll end up adding too much acidity to get the same effect.

“It’s about getting the perfect mouthful, the mouthful that hits every single note,” he tells me. “Even if you’re really paying attention, there’s no one taste. It’s many tastes.”

Getting those bright, fresh flavors to come together takes work, and you can do only so much ahead of time. “Every time you prepare a tartare it’s painful,” Mattos says. “It’s draining. You have to be patient and you have to be subtle. Other dishes are very easy to do because you can adjust while you cook, but if you go too far with acidity in a tartare there’s no way to correct it.” At the start of every shift, Mattos works with his cooks to establish a feel for how the ingredients are interacting that day. They make a tartare, taste it, then make another. Mattos has considered using a digital scale to measure each step to a fraction of a gram, but he’s worried that when the cooks follow the numbers they might lose their focus. “If I do that, these guys can put their guard down,” he says.

Thomas Carter, the co-owner of Estela and the former sommelier at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, walks over and puts it more succinctly. “I’ll tell you what he said when he was training a cook when we opened,” Carter says to me. “He told him, ‘You have to put your fucking life into the tartare. You put your fucking life into it.’ ”