This Is The Type Of Beef Texas Roadhouse Uses

When it comes to ordering steak at a restaurant, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get your money's worth. Freshness and quality are the first things you should be on the lookout for. Thankfully, Texas Roadhouse delivers on both accounts, all while keeping founder Kent Taylor's vision for the restaurant to be affordable in clear sight. To that end, the restaurant is one of several steakhouse chains that proudly serve never-frozen beef.

In Daily Meal's ultimate ranking of Texas Roadhouse steaks, the bone-in ribeye took the top spot because of its thick cut and beefy flavor from being cooked to perfection with the bone left in. However, the wow factor starts with the restaurant choosing to serve only fresh, USDA Choice cuts of steak. 

This high-quality beef grade is served in most steakhouses and may have less marbling (the fat woven throughout the meat) than its Prime-graded counterpart. That said, it's not as lean as Select-graded beef, the lowest of the USDA steak grades sold at the retail level. As a result, you get flavorful, juicy, and tender loin and rib cuts, while even the leaner cuts come out tender when braised, roasted, and simmered properly.

Texas Roadhouse is a chain that touts serving made-from-scratch meals, and the chain probably couldn't get more serious about aging and cutting its steaks if it tried. When whole cuts of beef arrive at the restaurants, they are aged according to the smaller cuts that will come from them. Tenderloins are aged for 14 days, for example, and all others wait anywhere between 22 and 25 days. Once aged, it's time to cut each steak.

The restaurant is the only casual dining chain that has a designated meat cutter present at every single location, and each of them will handle more than $1 million worth of beef per year. Experts in their roles, they work in rooms kept at 34 degrees Fahrenheit to cut each piece of whole beef into individual steaks for customers. Although having meat cutters at each restaurant costs more than purchasing precut steaks, Texas Roadhouse believes that meat cutting is something of a lost art. Plus, it's the best way for it to serve the freshest possible steaks at the sizes that its customers want. This means consistent results when cooking — something that reduces food waste.

One of the cool facts about Texas Roadhouse that only a true fan would know is that these meat cutters don't go unrecognized for their hard work. Every year, they're given the chance to compete in the restaurant's National Meat Cutters Challenge, with the winners bringing home tens of thousands of dollars. With all of this in mind, it's only fitting that Texas Roadhouse replaced Olive Garden as America's top casual restaurant chain with a massive increase in sales in 2024.