A beef stew dish that isn’t curry? We’ve been waiting for this!

When you feel like a hearty, meaty meal, there are few better places to turn than to fast food chain Matsuya. With beef, chicken, and pork all on the menu for less than 700 yen (US$5) a dish, you really can’t go wrong with filling up your belly there.

What’s even better is that right now, select restaurants are testing out a very fancy-sounding “Cut Steak Beef Stroganoff”. Only 69 stores across the country are serving this dish, and the advertisements make it look absolutely delectable. “Sizeable chunks of cut steak” and “soft, thin-cut beef” stewed in “a high-quality sauce brimming with richness”…Sign us up!

Since he hadn’t seen a stew-style beef dish that isn’t curry in a long time, our Japanese-language reporter Tasuku Egawa was immediately on the case. He went to the nearest restaurant offering the Cut Steak Beef Stroganoff and spotted its poster in the window.

▼ “Double beef and a rich, delicious sauce.”

The dish is offered with regular-size rice (850 yen), large-size rice (910 yen), and a low-carb version that comes with vegetables instead of rice (850 yen). It would appear that only the volume of rice changes depending on the size, not the amount of stroganoff.

Tasuku ordered it with large-size rice. Apparently, it takes a bit of time to prepare, but this was Matsuya, where nothing takes more than 10 minutes. Even so, Tasuku checked out the posters put up in the restaurant, which somehow managed to catch his eye.

▼ “We actually secretly started cutting our onions to wedges four years ago. It’s common in households, but it takes a surprising amount of time to prepare, so it’s actually unusual in the food industry.”

Tasuku stared at this poster for a long time, trying in vain to remember what the onion pieces looked like four years ago. He had a vague memory of doing a comparison article in the past and remembered that the type of onions Matsuya used tended to disintegrate in the stewing process. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t remember.

Another puzzling aspect revealed by the poster was the idea that cutting onions into wedges takes longer. Are they cutting them by hand? Are machines unable to do that cut? It was strangely interesting.

As Tasuku pondered this information, he came upon the next poster.

▼ “56 years of changes. Just including those we can count, the current broth is the 32nd iteration.”

“Does that mean they change the beef bowl soup at a rate of once every one to two years?!” Tasuku wondered. Now that he thought about it, there might have been times when he thought the flavor was slightly different.

As these revelations kept his attention, in no time his Cut Steak Beef Stroganoff had arrived with a large rice.

The stew came with nice, hearty servings of ingredients.

The onion was cut into relatively big pieces (wedges?).

There were five or six pieces of beef, which came flat like this one, as well as cubed.

When Tasuku picked up a piece with his chopsticks, it felt a bit on the firm side. Upon biting into it, Tasuku determined that, though it had a certain firmness to it, he wouldn’t say it wasn’t soft either.

It certainly seemed like cut steak. It didn’t have the kind of thick fat of other cuts and didn’t have a too-soft, shreddable type of texture either. It was proper beef through and through.

Plus, the stew itself was beautiful. Just look at that glisten!

It wasn’t too viscous, so Tasuku thought it would taste lighter, but when he tried it, it had a surprisingly oily feel to it and a very rich flavor. The advertisements didn’t lie when they mentioned “thick deliciousness”. It was a flavor with a lot of depth, and no matter how many spoonfuls he ate, every bite was packed full of beefy umami. Mixed into a large rice, this was certainly going to be a satisfying meal!

Without a doubt, this is a meal for the masses. If you’ve got a local Matsuya serving the Cut Steak Beef Stroganoff, you should definitely stop by and try it out! Tasuku thinks the colder the weather gets, the better it’ll taste.

Could it be as popular as the fan-favorite Gorogoro Chicken Curry? Only time will tell.

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