What is steak tartare?
Raw beef, chopped or minced, seasoned hard and served cold. Everything else about the dish is argument.
The short answer
Steak tartare is a plate of raw beef — cut by hand or put through a mincer — seasoned and served cold, usually with a raw egg yolk, something allium, something acidic and something crunchy, alongside bread or fries.
It is not marinated, not cured and not cooked. Nothing chemically transforms the meat: unlike ceviche, where citrus denatures fish protein, a tartare is dressed at the last moment precisely so the acid does not start working on it. That is the whole trick. The beef has to arrive as beef.
Where the name really comes from
You will read that Tatar horsemen tenderised raw meat under their saddles. It is a good story and it is not true — it circulated in nineteenth-century European travel writing, got repeated by novelists, and has been retold ever since as if it were etymology.
The paper trail runs through French restaurant cooking instead. In Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, the raw beef dish served with tartare sauce is listed as steak à la tartare and carries no egg yolk at all; the version topped with a raw yolk appears separately, as beefsteak à l'américaine. Over the twentieth century the two collapsed into one dish, the sauce quietly disappeared, and the yolk stayed. What we order today is the hybrid.
What is actually on the plate
A classical French build is beef, egg yolk, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire, Tabasco, capers, cornichons, shallot, parsley, salt, pepper and olive oil. Those components are not decoration — each one is doing a job: fat, salt, acid, heat and allium bite, balanced against meat that has no browning, no crust and nowhere to hide.
Modern kitchens substitute freely. A hard cheese can take over the salt, a pickled berry or a roasted vegetable can take over the acid, and the crunch can come from nuts, crisped bread or seeds rather than a fried potato. The substitutions work as long as the jobs still get done — which is exactly what this site is judging.
What it is called around Europe
In Sweden it is råbiff, traditionally served with egg yolk, capers, pickled beetroot and raw onion. In Germany and Austria it is Beef Tatar or Tatarbeefsteak, often spread on bread with onion and served with butter. France says tartare de bœuf, Italy tartare di manzo or battuta al coltello, Spain and Portugal steak tartar and bife tártaro.
The spelling splits too. British and French menus write tartare; American ones frequently write tartar, which is also the English word for the stuff your dentist scrapes off. Both spellings mean the same plate.
How to tell a good one
Texture first. Hand-cut beef has distinct pieces and bite; over-minced beef turns to paste and no amount of seasoning recovers it. Then temperature — a tartare must arrive properly cold, because raw beef that has warmed up goes soft and dull in the mouth almost immediately.
Then balance. Taste for whether you can still find the beef under the dressing. The most common failure in a restaurant is not under-seasoning but burial: truffle, cheese, sauce or crunch turned up so loud that the meat becomes texture rather than flavour. Every plate on this site is scored on those counts.