A Cut Above

The first time I meet Pete Eshelman, he is behind the counter of the open kitchen, shucking oysters. It is a special oyster weekend at Joseph Decuis restaurant in Roanoke, Indiana, and the owner, tall and athletic at almost 70, is pitching in.

He wields the oyster knife with skill while chatting away, explaining how he ended up in Japan studying with Wagyu master Shogo Takeda and then bringing his techniques, and a starter stock of his animals, to this corner of northeast Indiana. Today he has about 200 head of cattle at the farm he owns and runs with his wife, Alice, and his brother, Tim. They also run this farm-to-fork restaurant, the only one in the United States raising its own Wagyu beef.

The restaurant—named for the Eshelmans’ French ancestor and fellow farmer who emigrated to New Orleans—is one of the most lauded in the state, with awards from Wine Spectator, AAA and the Distinguished Restaurants of North America, among others.

The encounter is as unlikely as it is typical of the Eshelmans, I will learn. As successful as they are, they are refreshingly open, down-to-earth and unafraid to get their hands dirty. When Alice realized how much they were paying to buy and ship specialty produce, she started the raised-bed gardens where much of the vegetables and herbs for the restaurant are grown. “We are continually reinventing ourselves,” she says. “It’s been a lot of fun!” 

Origins

The story, almost mythic, starts on the East coast. Pete is playing baseball in the Yankee farm leagues. When he injures himself and can no longer play, he asks for a job in the front office. Told that nothing is available, he gets on a plane to New York and hangs out in George Steinbrenner’s waiting room until his persistence pays off. He learns the business and while in New York he meets and weds Alice, an actress.

They move to Roanoke when Pete is recruited for a job, but before long he and Tim are running their own high-profile insurance company, guaranteeing sports and celebrity contracts. On my tour of one of the luxuriously leather-bound man caves, I see the torch from the Olympic Games they insured.

Presented with the challenge of entertaining clients from New York, L.A., London, Zurich and so on, the Eshelmans buy an old bank building in the mostly abandoned downtown Roanoke and turn it into a private dining facility (vaults cleverly converted to wine cellars). Four years and much buzz later, Joseph Decuis restaurant opens to the public in 2000.

At one point, Wagyu beef makes an appearance on the menu of culinary delicacies. Impressed by the product and seeing an opportunity after legal protocols in the 1990s opened up the exportation of Wagyu genetics, the Eshelman brothers head to Japan.

The beef

Wagyu (wa means Japanese and gyu means beef) is a breed of cattle native to Japan, considered a national treasure. Famous for its generous marbling, Japanese beef is rated on a scale that starts at 21.4% intermuscular marbling and goes up to 56.3%. For comparison, the U.S. Prime scale starts at 12%.

It’s hard to compare this beef to any other. It melts in your mouth with a buttery decadence. It needs no aging—an American invention for tenderizing tough cuts, says Pete, who has written a book on Wagyu beef and served as the president of the American Wagyu Association. Although Wagyu sold in the United States may legally be crossbred to just under half Wagyu, the Eshelmans raise only full-blooded cattle. They adhere strictly to “traditional Japanese husbandry practices—all natural, humane, drug-free, stress-free,” as described on their website.