billybud wrote:Spence...our better restaurant here in rural western North Carolina serves Meats by Linz beef (dry aged) out of Chicago....pretty good tasting steaks for being 100 miles from a city and in a town of 427....
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CASH ... 66&bih=641
I'm partial to dry aged myself, although it is a real hassle for restaurants to handle. They have to estimate what they are going to sell a month before they sell it to start the process. Some people don't care for dry aging because of the faint twang you get when you taste it. Some don't really know what they are eating. We were in Vegas at the Paris hotel where Gordon Ramsey has a steak house that advertises dry aged beef. When we got our food and I tasted it, I knew right away that is was not dry aged. I told the waitress and she assured me it was dry aged. So I told her to tell the chef to come out to our table and tell me that it was dry aged in person. 5 minutes later the chef brought me a bottle of wine to the table and he told me that they had over sold their dry aged product. They had just opened and had under estimated the response to their opening. So what we received had only been drying for about a week. I was probably the only person in the building who even knew besides the kitchen. The beef was still prime and very good, just not what they were advertising. I'm sure that is a fairly common practice because once it hits the age and the moisture has been removed, it is decomposed to the point that it has to be used quickly or they lose it - so they err on the side of profit. Can't really blame them for that, especially when most people can't tell anyway.
The Smokey mountains hold a lot of hidden gems. Looks like you found one of them.