37 hours. 9 meals. 21 pounds of beef. Putting his cholesterol count on the line, Daniel Duane embarks on a gluttonous quest to discover the future of steak.

by Daniel Duane
photographs by Jeff Minton

The first sign of trouble — the first fleeting hint that there might be a limit to how much steak, no matter how exquisitely prepared, a single human stomach could hold — surfaced at 9:30 pm in the tasteful, upscale Tom Colicchio restaurant Craftsteak, deep inside the festive and glittering halls of the MGM Grand Casino. In a truly heroic streak of nonstop gluttony over the prior 32 hours, my two teammates and I had relentlessly salted, carved, chewed, and swallowed every last bite of 27 expertly seared slabs of cow meat on the Las Vegas Strip. Sixteen pounds in total, and always with side dishes and fruit-bomb red wines, and we’d done great — not just surviving but savoring, even interrogating chefs on their most cutting edge of meat-cooking techniques and the eternal question: to sauce or not to sauce?

But then two Craftsteak waiters set down a 10-ounce USDA prime filet ($56); a 10-ounce wagyu beef filet from Snake River Farms in Idaho ($115); a six-ounce filet of grade 10 wagyu beef from the Blackmore Ranch in Queensland, Australia ($138); and an entire six-ounce filet of grade 12 A5 wagyu beef from Kagoshima, Japan ($180). A once-in-a-lifetime filet mignon comparison tasting that, at any other moment on any other day, would have elicited sobs of ecstasy, and this is all I heard out of Jon Pageler, a liquor executive, skirt hound, and the single worst influence I’ve ever considered a dear friend:

“I’m guessing porn stars.”

“What?”

“Those chicks over there.”

Thirteen women gathered around a nearby table: loose dresses falling off salon-browned shoulders and hair so teased wild it looked as if they’d just crawled out of an orgy, reapplied their lipstick, and gone hunting for protein.

“What’s your guess?” Pageler asked. “Hookers?”

“For chrissakes, Jon, do you mind?”

Our third teammate, see, was my father-in-law: a real-estate financier and a fine upstanding citizen who swore he had no idea why every Caesars Palace casino employee kept smiling at him and saying things like, “Welcome back, Mr. Weil. It’s such a joy to see you again.” Fortunately, he was dozing off now. Sitting next to me at a high-end restaurant but dozing off nonetheless.

Right from the start I’d been afraid of this moment. Telling that first waiter at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill that we wanted every one of his money-shot steaks and thereby kicking off a monumental eating binge with what I normally would have considered a day-destroying lunch, I’d felt a quiver of fear very much like I would’ve felt now if somebody had told me that all 13 of those hookers or porn stars — or whoever they were — were going to do me, tag team–style, in every imaginable way for the next day and a half with no breaks. But once my teeth actually bit through those first layers of Flay’s red-and-black-pepper-crusted filet mignon with mushroom-ancho-chile sauce, I put aside my fears and greeted each subsequent meal with a growing certainty that my life was utterly blessed.

The angels were still singing in my ears well into this second night of multiple steak dinners, starting at the supremely refined Joël Robuchon and moving on to a Michael Mina place called Seablue that is nominally a seafood restaurant but, in reality, because Vegas is Vegas and men are men, is a wildly successful steakhouse with a one-of-a-kind grill marrying mesquite charcoal with an endless supply of apricot wood. And yet now here at Craftsteak — the eighth of a planned nine restaurants, with an epic feast at a Mario Batali joint yet to come this very night — my thoughts drifted to ipecac, that vomit-triggering medication so beloved by adolescent ballerinas. I also began to visualize a very private and very nicely scented toilet in some remote desert spa, followed by a Zen wheatgrass enema tenderly delivered by a smooth-skinned young woman with a foreign accent. And I might have drifted away altogether if my father-in-law hadn’t snapped me back.

“What’d you say?” I asked because I hadn’t heard properly.

“Australian wagyu,” he muttered, chewing something.

“Yeah?”

“It’s the…”

“What’s that, Doug? What’d you say?”

It was no use. He’d fallen back to sleep.