Despite all the well-earned accolades between them, Scott Stein and chef Antimo DiMeo felt a bit frazzled on the phone last year while negotiating cattle prices from specialty ranch in El Paso. The main problem? They didn’t speak dude ranch.

“Buying whole cows for the first time, it was a little intimidating,” Stein says. “Their terminology, their accents, their whole tableside manner was different.” The restaurateurs behind Bardea Steak eventually broke the ice. It turned out to be a pivotal deal in the midst of an agonizingly long R&D ramp-up that spanned more than a year and was blunted by the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic.