Fifty-pound tomahawk subprimals hang from steel hooks in front of a wall of Himalayan salt at Chr Steak, overlooking Gainesville’s historic Downtown square. Some will hang there for four months before they ever hit the heat. The restaurant’s glass front gives anyone waiting on a table a front-row seat to the main attraction: meat rotated from newer to older, tagged and dated, with nothing hidden in the background.
That’s part of the appeal, says chef-owner Jeremy Green. Dry aging has a reputation for being complicated, but Green wants to pull back the curtain. “It’s not a super intimidating thing,” he says. “It can be a clean, nice process.”
He didn’t build the room himself, though he had a lot of input in the construction—he brought in The Aging Room, a company that specializes in, what else but aging rooms, salt-backed walls and all, engineered to keep humidity low and air moving so it slowly pulls moisture out of the beef and concentrates that meaty flavor.
But the room is only the visible part. Getting a steak from that hook to a plate at Chr takes a specific chain of decisions—where the beef comes from, how it’s butchered, how long it hangs, how it’s cooked—and Green has an opinion about every link.
Here’s how a tomahawk actually gets from “green” to your table.
Dry vs. Wet Aging
The two methods start from the same fabricated animal but diverge immediately. Wet-aged beef is vacuum-sealed in Cryovac packaging right after the loin is broken down, then left to age inside that plastic for a set window—28 to 35 days is Chr’s spec—which keeps things consistent and approachable. Dry-aged beef skips the packaging entirely. The loin goes into the open air of a controlled room, cold and dry, and stays there anywhere from a month to well over four, losing moisture and weight the whole time as the flavor concentrates and the texture changes.
Wet-aging is the safer, more familiar bet; dry-aging is the slower, higher-maintenance version that trades some yield for a bigger payoff in flavor and feel.
From the Animal to the Room
The program starts before the meat ever reaches the dry aging room. Green buys through Buckhead Meat and specifically asks for a supplier whose cattle top out lighter than most, ideally around 900 pounds. Lighter cattle mean smaller, denser loins instead of the wide, flat cuts you get off a bigger animal. For dry-aging, the subprimals come in “green,” meaning there’s no age on them at all.
Green’s team breaks those down by hand. “The more processed stuff you get, the more hands that touch it. I would prefer those just to be mine,” he says.
There’s a practical reason too: the aging room needs whole loins, not individual steaks. A portioned cut won’t hold up through weeks of open-air aging the way an intact primal will.
Before anything gets hung, the loins are rubbed with Buffalo Trace bourbon from a custom barrel Green picked out himself, then coated in Kobe beef tallow whipped together with a house oil blend. Green says the tallow pulls double duty: it seals the surface against bacteria, and it lets him age longer without losing yield to trim. “I’m not trimming as much of the funk off the loins,” he says, “because the tallow kind of seals them.”
The Long Game
Green keeps his room colder and drier than most operations—33.5 to 34°F, with 33.8 as his personal sweet spot. That’s lower and slower than the industry standard, and he does it on purpose. Push the temperature or humidity up and aging speeds up, but you lose yield, and the flavor gets coarser, he says.
Most cuts hang a minimum of 30 days. The bigger subprimals go much longer. Two 50-pound tomahawks are currently tracking toward an October pull at around 120 days, and Green says he’s taken a large enough primal all the way to 140 days without trouble—his longest yet. Only the big, heavy bone-in cuts can go that long; a single ribeye won’t survive it. Yield loss on a long age runs 7 to 9 percent, by his numbers.
What comes out isn’t the sharp, blue-cheese funk people associate with aging. Green describes it as concentrated—beef flavor turned up to 11—with a texture that’s noticeably different from wet-aged meats. Shorter fibers mean less resistance, resulting in a bite that melts in your mouth.
He credits a UK-based master butcher, introduced through The Aging Room, as an informal mentor while he was developing the program—mostly phone calls, he says, though the invitation to fly over and butcher alongside him is still open.
To the Broiler
Chr’s beef isn’t cooked over open flame. Green uses a double-deck infrared broiler that gets up to roughly 1,700°F, split into four independently controlled heat zones. He says the call came down partly to space: live fire would have meant finding somewhere to store wood. The heat gets him a hard sear that a standard broiler can’t touch, and the four zones let his team move different cuts around instead of cooking everything at one temperature.
Every steak gets a dry rub first: dehydrated garlic, toasted black pepper, a specific smoked paprika, kosher salt, ground coarse enough that it crusts instead of falling off. Off the broiler, steaks rest five to eight minutes, then get brushed with a second coating of tallow, this one steeped with roasted garlic and fresh herbs. Plating adds a seared, split garlic clove and an ounce of the kitchen’s demi-glace, built from roasted veal bones, mirepoix, cabernet, and herbs, reduced over three days.
What’s on the Plate
The bone-in ribeye (aka, the cowboy cut) is one of Chr’s top sellers, running a close race with the filet and the wet-aged prime ribeye. Rounding out the dry-aged list is a porterhouse and T-bone, both cut from the same short loin in different ratios of strip to filet, and an 8-ounce filet.
For anyone who prefers wet-aged, you can’t go wrong with the Snake River Farms wagyu New York Strip. Ask Green what he orders, and it’s not on the menu by name. He prefers spinalis, the marbled cap muscle off the ribeye, a cut he says most steakhouses never bother running.
Green is 47 now, and he’s been cooking since he was 15, starting with odd jobs, culinary school, then a string of kitchens chasing a Thomas Keller-level standard. He turned down executive chef offers in his early 20s because he wasn’t done learning yet. Putting the aging room behind glass in the middle of the dining room tracks with that: he wants people to see the work.
So what’s on the menu next? Green is thinking about dry-aging lamb, and maybe one day fish. You’ll just have to swing by to see what’s hanging behind the glass.
Chr Steak, 126 Bradford St. NE, Ste. 100, Gainesville, chrsteak.com
