More than a decade ago, The Hollywood Reporter ventured inside one of Los Angeles’ strangest and most decadent industry traditions: Beefsteak, a sprawling, carnivorous feast where Hollywood comedy writers and their friends gathered to eat enormous quantities of meat with their bare hands.
Eleven Beefsteaks and one pandemic later, the party is still going. And according to longtime host and The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman, this year’s edition — held, like the others, at Vibiana (a cathedral turned event space), under the watchful eye of chef Neal Fraser — may be the most over-the-top yet.
“I hate to say the phrase ‘best Beefsteak yet,’” Selman says. “But the fact that we have Dario Cecchini, the ultimate king, the most famous butcher in all of Tuscany, slicing and preparing and providing the beef as only he can is kind of a huge deal.”
Cecchini is the mustachioed Italian butcher and restaurateur whose theatrical approach to meat has made him an international culinary celebrity. He will descend on Los Angeles for the 11th edition of Beefsteak, bringing a bit of Tuscany to a tradition with roots considerably closer to Tammany Hall than the Tuscan hills.
Historically, beefsteaks were communal meat feasts that flourished in late-19th- and early-20th-century New York, where politicians and working men gathered to consume alarming quantities of beef, traditionally without utensils. The Los Angeles incarnation revived that spirit for an entirely different constituency: comedy writers, actors, producers and assorted Hollywood hangers-on looking to spend one night behaving as though cholesterol had never been discovered.
