The Steak Revolution. What Drives Us?

By Enrico Negrini, Executive Chef and Owner of Divino Restaurant Group

There is a question that returns to me often, and sometimes unsettles me more than I'd like to admit: what does it actually mean to get better? Divino turns ten this August, and in ten years I can't claim that every service, every dish, every night has been perfect. What I can claim — without hesitation — is that we have never stopped evolving.

Some of our longtime guests have watched favorite dishes disappear from the menu, or come back changed almost beyond recognition. That is not carelessness. That is the thing that defines this team: we are rooted in tradition, but we have never treated tradition as a reason to stand still. Our dining rooms have been renovated more times than I can count. The way we greet you, the way we walk you through a dish, the rhythm of a meal at Divino — all of it has shifted over the years, sometimes in ways our guests notice immediately, sometimes in ways that only show up over a decade. But the biggest evolution of all may still be unfolding right now.

A new obsession took hold of me — one that demanded I go deeper into our ingredients than I ever had before, into where they come from and how to care for them properly. The steaks we serve today share almost nothing with the steaks we were serving even a few years ago. We made a deliberate shift toward grass-fed beef, from cattle raised without confinement, because that is where the deeper, more complex flavors live. And we stopped relying on others for the next step: we began dry-aging the beef ourselves, in-house, refining a process that has elevated everything that came before it.

We didn't arrive at our current method by guessing. We ran the trials — 45 days, 60, 75, 90 — and built a different timeline for nearly every cut, until a pattern emerged: the more marbling a cut carries, and the larger its bone, the further the dry-aging process can take it. Pushed properly, the flavor moves somewhere beyond beef entirely — toward foie gras, toward blue cheese, toward almonds — and the bite that results is not something you'd want every day. It's not meant to be. It's a celebratory steak, built for an occasion, even if the occasion is simply choosing to treat yourself well.

We wanted to share that experience as widely as we could. We underestimated, badly, how many of you would feel the same pull toward it — the first batch of dry-aged steaks at Divino Taipei sold out within days. I think that came down to a combination of things: ten years of consistency that our guests already trust, and a price that sits at roughly half of what Taipei's dedicated steakhouses charge for dry-aged beef of comparable quality. We can hold that price for two reasons — we do the aging ourselves, with no outside party adding their margin to the process, and we work directly with importers, which means certain cuts arrive at Divino and nowhere else in this city.

There's a third reason, and it matters more to me than the first two: this is what Divino has always stood for, and what it will keep standing for. It's the same instinct that shaped how we built our wine list — bringing in the very best Italy has to offer, then finding every way we could to keep it within reach. We're applying that same instinct to steak. We want this experience to be felt, not reserved for a rare few. We want Divino to be the place you come back to — whether that's once a month or twice a year — and find a version of home waiting for you: a proper steakhouse experience, beef honored from the way it was raised through every day of its aging, finished over charcoal, and paired with a red that can stand up to it.

This is a revolution that has been building in me for ten years, and it hasn't cooled. If anything, it burns hotter now than it ever has. And every part of it exists for one reason: to put you — and the experience you have at our table — at the very center of it.