Many restaurants stopped being willing to serve rare / medium rare hamburgers some years ago, due to concerns over foodborne illnesses that further cooking (which raises the internal temperature of the patty) neutralizes.
It’s apparently more of an issue for ground meat than it is for a steak, since the bacteria are more commonly found on the “outside surfaces” of meat, and when meat is ground up, those surfaces wind up throughout the meat (while, on a steak, those surfaces remain on the outside of the food, and are cooked more thoroughly).
Bad news for those who like rare burgers, but at least there’s some thought behind their decision.
It’s a holistic scale. If the center is pink to partly bloody, the entire steak is fully cooked and any further efforts result in an overcooked (ruint) piece of meat.
And rare hamburgers? I don’t worry about e-coli with slabs o meat because the bacterial contamination only gets splattered onto the surface–which gets fire. But with ground beef it’s essentially ALL surface with the nasties buried deep inside as well as on the surface.
ninja’d. Teach me to post during lunchtime.
A decent establishment will make their rare burgers from steak that has been cooked rare (i.e. seared on the outside to deal with any surface contamination), then ground up. You get a little bit of seared meat in the middle of the burger that way, but it’s hardly noticeable.
A steak can be cooked to any degree of doneness consistently all the way through by cooking it sous vide. Although cooking a sous vide steak well done should result in criminal penalties.
I know why some don’t serve them (liability issues), but restaurants serve raw seafood, raw eggs, and even raw ground beef (steak tartare), and all they do is put a small disclaimer at the bottom of the menu.
Adults don’t always behave like grownups when it comes to risk - I have literally had adult humans say to me (not in the context of food) “Look, get on and do it - I accept the risks. Just make sure they don’t happen to me”
And even without using sous vide (which can be difficult in a restaurant, if you can’t predict your orders far in advance), you can get meat to a uniform degree of doneness (whatever your preferred level is) just by slicing it thinner. I’m not sure why this isn’t more popular.
Like you said, liability. In this day and age, there are too many stupid people out there who will CLAIM to accept the risks, but then will turn around and sue if they get sick.
Or else they had issues in the past. Businesses are terrified of being sued. It’s the same reason for zero tolerance in schools.
Unless you’re eating straight from a just-downed cow, “bloody” is a misleading word to use to refer to steak. That’s myoglobin you’re seeing, not blood.
And don’t forget the next of kin. You may be a person of honor and accept responsibility for your own actions, but your widow and orphan children may want revenge (and money).
Of course, the restaurant could ask you to sign a waiver of liability, but yelp reviews that say “the first thing the restaurant did when I sat down was made me sign a paper saying it was OK if their food killed me” won’t go over very well.
