Most steak menus give you three things: a name, a weight and a price. A serious one gives you five or six more per cut, printed in small type under the dish name, and almost nobody reading them knows what any of it means. Breed, feed days, region, a marble score, sometimes a letter and a number that look like a filing reference. All of it is telling you something specific about what will arrive on the plate.
Marble score is a number, not an adjective
Australian beef is graded on the AUS-MEAT marbling scale, which runs from 0 to 9+. Most Australian beef sits somewhere between MB3 and MB7, and the highest marbled wagyu carries MB8 or MB9+. The Japanese system runs further, to 12, so the Australian scale tops out at 9 and everything above it is folded into 9+.
The practical version: on one menu you might find an MB2 sirloin at 300 grams and an MB9 wagyu sirloin at the same 300 grams, for roughly three times the price. Same cut, same weight. The number is the entire difference, and it is a measure of intramuscular fat.
Higher is not automatically better, which is the part people get wrong. More marbling means a richer, softer, more buttery mouthful, and past a certain point that becomes something you want less of rather than more. An MB9 at 300 grams is a lot of steak in a way an MB4 at 300 grams is not.
Feed days tell you more than the breed does
When a menu says 150 days grain fed, or 380, or 430, or 600, that number is doing real work. Longer feeding builds marbling and changes the character of the fat, including how soft it is and the temperature at which it renders. A 600 day programme and a 150 day programme produce genuinely different eating, even before you get to breed.
Grass fed versus grain fed is not a quality ladder either, whatever the marketing implies. Grass fed tends to be leaner with a more mineral, savoury flavour. Grain fed tends to be sweeter and softer. They are different propositions, and which one you want depends on the night rather than on which is objectively superior.
The F number on wagyu is the one to ask about
If a wagyu cut carries F1, F2, F3 or F4, that is describing genetics rather than grade. The higher the number, the closer the animal is to fullblood wagyu, with lower numbers crossed with other breeds. In Australia, beef needs at least 50 per cent wagyu genetics before it can be labelled as wagyu at all.
So the word “wagyu” on its own tells you remarkably little. An F1 at MB9 is a real and very good steak, but it is not the same animal as a fullblood, and a menu that prints the F number is being straight with you about which one you are getting.
The weight includes the bone
This is the one that costs people money, and no menu spells it out. An 800 gram T-bone is not 800 grams of meat. Bone-in cuts carry a substantial share of that listed weight in bone, and a tomahawk carries more of it than almost anything else on the board, because the long frenched rib bone is most of what makes it look impressive.
Which means a 250 gram eye fillet can feed one person more comfortably than a 600 gram bone-in porterhouse, and the numbers on the page will not tell you that. What does tell you is the language around the cut. “Carved tableside” and “served sliced” are the kitchen quietly saying it expects this one to be shared. “Pre-order only”, usually with 24 hours’ notice, means it is not held in the fridge and somebody has to bring it in for you. Those three phrases are better portion guidance than any weight in grams.
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What a menu worth trusting actually looks like
The test is simple. Pick any cut and see whether you can find the breed, the feeding programme and how long for, the region it came from, the weight and the marble score. If all six are there for every steak, the kitchen is buying carefully enough to want you to know. If a line reads “wagyu sirloin, 300g” and stops, you are being asked to take a word on trust, and the word covers everything from a 50 per cent cross to a fullblood.
You can see the fuller version of this on the menu at Elements Bar and Grill, a steakhouse Sydney has traded through since 2018, where every cut is listed with its breed, its feed days, its region and its score, right down to the paddock in Gippsland or the pastures in Tasmania.
None of this makes you a harder customer to serve. It makes you a better one to talk to, and any floor team that knows their product would rather have that conversation than take an order for “the big one”.
