“A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age,” says Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing. No one seems to have told this to Francis Mallmann. “To eat steak, the knife must be not serrated but very sharp,” says the chef and author of Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way, who also owns a cluster of the best restaurants in Argentina and Uruguay. “Tenderness comes from the best hung beast and the heroic job of the asador [who sets the fire and tends to the meats]. It's a long line of small victories from the baby beast to the plate.”

Central to Mallmann's philosophy of cooking is the pampas, the vast plains that produce some of the world's best cattle, starting in the south of Brazil, sweeping through Uruguay and ending in Argentina. So which country's steaks taste the best? The Argentine's surprisingly magnanimous answer: “Probably today Brazil and Uruguay has more quality than us.”

Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.