From New York magazine’s Grub Street blog: "The Esquire Almanac of
Steak is in the September issue, but so massive a piece of ordnance is
it that the magazine is staggering its online release so as not to
overwhelm the Internet. The feature might be the mightiest devoted to
steak that any magazine has ever published. Some elements are a little
weak: John Mariani’s “20 Best Steaks in America” is arbitrary and
long-winded, and more a platform for snappy descriptors (“You name your
restaurant Steak Frites, you better get this one right. They do.”) than
accurate or insightful "carniseurship." But the main articles are
downright brilliant.
Hasten immediately to Tom Chiarella’s “Butcher”
feature, which starts with the immortal sentence “The sink is full of
tongues”; Eliot Kaplan’s pitch-perfect profile of the overhyped but
lovable Bern’s Steakhouse in Tampa; a tribute to the pre-steak martini
by Dave Wondrich; and, best of all, Tom Junod’s meditation on Wagyu
beef, which should go on the short list of the best steak essays of all
time, right along with Jeffrey Steingarten’s “High Steaks” and Joseph
Mitchell’s “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks.” It compresses meaty
physicality, cooking, consumption, and a twinned pair of moral
epiphanies into less space than it takes to review a movie."