Larry Olmsted

Special for USA TODAY

For serious food lovers, traditionally bred Japanese beef is one of the most coveted ingredients — much richer, fattier and more thoroughly marbled than even the highest grades of Western steak. It is also surprisingly difficult to get outside of Japan – the vast majority of restaurants claiming to serve Japanese beef, or wagyu, are lying. Because these rarefied meats are not trademarked in the USA, the real thing gets no legal protection, and this is especially true for the most famous regional wagyu, Kobe beef.

Kobe is produced in minuscule quantities annually, only in one Japanese prefecture, and is so scarce and desirable that the cattle producers group in Kobe, Japan licenses individual restaurants and distributors to import the real thing. There are only three such restaurant licenses in the entire USA – in New York, Honolulu and at the Wynn Las Vegas resort. Almost all other “Kobe” on menus in this country is fake, especially when it comes to lower priced Kobe burgers or sliders, which are inevitably bogus. Because it is illegal to import Japanese beef with bones, any steak that is not boneless cannot be real — there are no wagyu porterhouse or short ribs.

But if you do want to try real Japanese wagyu breeds and see what all the fuss is about, you are in luck, because there is no better place outside its homeland to do so than in Las Vegas. Sin City has the greatest concentration of restaurants importing real wagyu, and is home to the only place in the entire country serving both Kobe and the even rarer Hokkaido Snow Beef: Mizumi restaurant in the Wynn Las Vegas. Wynn is unique in that the resort holds the license, so you can try real Kobe at either Mizumi or SW Steakhouse, while several Wynn eateries offer other top regional forms of wagyu, such as Ohmi and Matsusaka.

“As steak lovers we all know a USDA Prime New York Strip, that’s the benchmark,” says David Walzog, executive chef at SW Steakhouse. “If you consider that steak to be a 10 in terms of marbling, beef flavor and ‘steakiness,’ then Kobe, Ohmi or the Matsusaka A5 wagyu would be around 18-20. They are the holy trinity of Japanese beef.”

Japanese wagyu is graded on several complex scales, and the results are combined into a single number from 1-5, with 5 being the highest. When you see things like A8 or A10 wagyu on a menu, this is a spurious red flag. At the handful of Vegas eateries importing the real thing from Japan, most are A4 or A5, among the best you can buy. Even visitors from Japan come here to try their own famous steaks.

“Mizumi is one of just four restaurants in the world outside of Hokkaido where you can try Snow Beef,” says Devin Hashimoto, executive chef. “We have a lot of Japanese guests and we’ve had people from Tokyo and Kyoto who don’t get up to Hokkaido telling us that they had to come to Las Vegas to finally try it for the first time.”

Like other big “expense account” cities, Las Vegas has plenty of high-price eateries and steakhouses making untrue claims about serving Japanese beef, but it also has the most places serving the real thing. Wagyu is always expensive, so if you are going to splurge, here are a few reliable spots we recommend in the gallery above.

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