For three generations now, the Bay Area’s Flannery family has had one singular mission: bring the world the best steaks imaginable. The family originally got into the meat business when patriarch Bryan Flannery Sr. launched Bryan’s Quality Meats, a butcher’s shop originally located in San Francisco’s legendary Grant Market, in 1963.
Flannery’s son Bryan Flannery Jr. later took up his father’s torch, spending his entire career in the family business. He’s now passing it on to his daughter Katie Flannery, one of the most prominent women in the male-dominated world of fine meat. The business is now known as Flannery Beef and is located in San Rafael. But even after five-plus decades, one thing hasn’t changed: Flannery still has the best beef around.
The Flannerys aren’t farmers or ranchers, and Flannery Beef doesn’t raise its own cattle. Rather, I like to think of the company as a curator of meat. They choose the best cows from ranches in California and Montana, personally overseeing how the animals are pastured and selected. They then process the resulting beef into steaks at their North Bay facility, using old-school butchery techniques inherited from Bryan Sr.
One of those techniques is dry-aging. During dry-aging, beef is broken down into “primal” cuts, which are then kept in a temperature-controlled environment for weeks or months at a time. According to a long manifesto about the process on the Flannery Beef website, during dry-aging “natural enzymes…slowly begin to break down the molecular bonds of the meat”, making it more tender and enhancing its flavor. According to Flannery, “If you’ve ever had a steak…that has blown you away with its flavor and tenderness,” it was probably dry-aged.
Flannery Beef also has another secret up its sleeve. A company spokesperson told me that Flannery sources its beef from Holstein cattle, rather than the more common Angus or Hereford breeds. Holsteins are your classic cow, complete with cartooney black and white spots — if you asked a third grader to draw a cow, you’d get a picture of a Holstein. They’re usually dairy cows, which means that the females enjoy a relatively long life providing milk, but the males are generally destined for veal production.
Flannery’s Holsteins, though, are different. They’remale cows (steers)that are diverted away from the world of veal and raised to maturity on open pastures. The use of Holsteins gives Flannery’s steaks a unique, rich beef flavor, while also providing a better, more natural life for the cows. Sourcing mature Holsteins provides a better source of revenue for small ranchers and farmers too, Flannery’s spokesperson told me, because the ranchers would otherwise have to sell their male cows young, when they’re less valuable.
The end result of Flannery’s unique sourcing, butchery and aging is beef that’s out-of-this-world delicious. According to a profile in the Los Angeles Times, Flannery Beef originally sold its beef primarily to high-end restaurants. When celebrity tennis player Andre Agassi developed a liking for the company’s beef and asked Flannery to ship him some in Las Vegas, though, the company stumbled into an exciting new opportunity — sending beef by mail.
Today, Flannery Beef ships their beef anywhere basically anywhere in the world. Earlier this month, Flannery sent me a box of beef, so I could try out the Bay Area legend’s steaks firsthand. I’m not a Michelin-starred chef (or Chrissy Tiegen, who is apparently a Flannery fan). But I do cook and eat a lot of steaks, so I felt I was in a good position to put the company’s meat through its paces.
My box of Flannery Beef steaks arrived via a special courier service. That’s because Flannery ships their steaks raw rather than frozen, and they have to be handled carefully to reach customers’ doorsteps in optimal condition. Once they arrive, Flannery told me in a letter that one can either use them in 4–6 days or freeze them for 6–7 months without much impact on their quality.
My box contained a cornucopia of beef — two massive 28-ounce “Jorge” California reserve rib steaks, a huge hunk of hangar steak, and a Chateaubriand that was almost as big as my dog. Flannery’s steaks are beautifully marbled, and the rib steak is nearly two inches thick and served on the bone. To start, I decided to cook one of the Jorge rib steaks on the stovetop and in my oven.
I busted the steak out of its vacuum bag (Flannery’s steaks are shipped vacuum-sealed to keep their juices contained) and seasoned it liberally with salt and pepper. The letter that Flannery sent with my steaks provided relatively little in the way of specific cooking advice (one section begins “What about cooking? Short Answer: What about it?”), so I decided to wing it and cook the giant steak based on my own experience.
First, I heated equal parts butter and oil in a pan and browned the steak for a total of twelve minutes, flipping it once at the 8-minute mark. That left it with a deep, tasty, caramelized exterior, but it was still extremely rare on the inside. Some people might choose to stop at that point, but I was planning to share the steak with my family and kids, so I popped it onto an oven-safe baking ban, plunged a meat thermometer into the middle, and cooked it in a 350-degree oven for about another half hour until the middle registered 145 degrees. I then let it rest for about 10 minutes, sliced the beef off the bone, and served it up.
Heaven. The steak was indescribably good, with a rich, intense beef flavor that permeated every part, from the gristly chunks around the bone to the fat-laden bits at the periphery, as well as the sea of marbled muscle in between. Flannery’s Holsteins are raised on pastures but finished with grain, which gives their meat aggressive marbling and rich, flavorful fat with none of the gaminess of grass-finished beef. Even though I’d cooked my steak medium, it was still incredibly juicy and tender, probably as a result of the dry-aging process. It was a triumph of beef, served in my own home in about 45 minutes of cooking.
For completeness, I cooked my second Jorge steak on my backyard grill later in the week, searing it on both sides before cooking it low and slow to the same 145-degree internal temperature. It was just as flavorful as the first steak, although it had a bit more of a well-done center as a result of the conductive heat of the grill. The effects of floating in a cloud of smoke from fat dripping off the steak and immolating on the hot grill below made it even more intensely beefy than the first steak, though. I liked both methods of cooking Flannery’s rib steaks and would be hard-pressed to choose a favorite.
My family also experimented with freezing some of our steaks and defrosting them later. After the steaks had spent about a week in the freezer, my wife defrosted the hangar steak and used an Instant Pot to transform it into the filling for amazing cheesesteak sliders. The slow cooking of the Instant Pot rendered the hangar steak super tender and melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and the meal was a big family hit.
I love that Flannery Beef is continuing a Bay Area tradition that spans more than half a century, and that they’ve modernized their business to keep pace with the 21st century. I also love that they’re now a woman-owned enterprise and that Katie Flannery appears primed to keep the family business going for another generation.
I also love that Flannery Beef is democratizing access to a product that formerly would only be available at $200-per-head Michelin-starred steakhouses, making it possible for anyone to cook and serve a world-class steak in their own home. Yes, Flannery’s beef is still a splurge — the rib steaks I cooked go for $45 per pound on Flannery’s website. But mine was big enough to serve two adults and two kids.
And more to the point, I didn’t have to schlep our family of five to a fancy restaurant to get it — I could throw the steak in a pan at the end of a long workday and have a meal rivaling that of any restaurant on the table in under an hour. In these pandemic times — and especially if you have kids — that’s a pretty remarkable capability.
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What I love most, though, is the flavor of Flannery’s steaks. If I could afford to eat Flannery Beef every day, I definitely would. Given that I’m not Crissy Tiegen, though, I can definitely see ordering from Flannery any time I want to celebrate a special occasion at home or otherwise prepare a stellar meal using the best possible ingredients. Flannery also sells a variety of gift boxes, which would make the perfect holiday gift or Father’s/Mother’s Day gift for the meat lover in your life.
Fifty-eight years ago, Bryan Flannery Sr. started his SF butcher’s shop with the goal of serving the best possible steaks. Three generations later, his granddaughter has done him proud, keeping up a tradition that now belongs both to the Flannery family and the broader Bay Area. Flannery’s is a tale of family connection, obsession with detail, and above all else — amazing beef.
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