Duluth restaurant's meat cutter back in contest after error found

• Dan Willeck

Dan Willeck, a meat cutter with Texas Roadhouse in Duluth, is one of 24 semi-finalists for the restaurant chain’s Meat Cutter of the Year honor. His hand-cut steaks are displayed in the restaurant’s display cooler. (Photo courtesy of Texas Roadhouse)

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You could call Dan Willeck the comeback kid.

Willeck, the Duluth Texas Roadhouse’s primo meat cutter, was competing to be the national restaurant chain’s meat-cutting champ when he was eliminated in November from the competition’s second of four rounds.

Competing against other regional champions, Willeck lost out. But it was darn close.

“It was a real bummer,” Willeck, 27, of Cloquet, said last week. “We were already celebrating.”

That’s because Willeck keeps pretty good track of how many steaks he cuts, how precisely he cuts them, how fast and how much fat and gristle are on them, which make up the judges’ scores. And he could have sworn his score was high enough to finish among the top six who are moving on to the semifinal round next week at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.

Turns out, Willeck was right.

“We found out there was some mathematical error,” said Jim McCann, the contest manager. “He did make it. It was very close but we miscalculated.”

Willeck got the news that he was back in the contest about three weeks later. Instead of six moving on in the competition for Meat Cutter of the Year for the restaurant chain known for its hand-cut steaks, he will be the seventh.

“I was pretty bummed, because I thought I had gotten ripped off,” he said. “Once I got the news, it’s just a really great feeling to feel you’re back in the race for 20,000 bucks.”

That’s how much the winner will get.

“It would make a nice down payment on a house,” Willeck noted.

In the meantime, he’s continuing to train, timing himself in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler as he reduces large sections of beef into expertly cut steaks — hundreds of them in a day.

The annual Texas Roadhouse National Meat Cutting Challenge started with more than 200 of the chain’s meat cutters competing. Now they’re down to 24, McCann noted.

“It gets very, very exciting from this point on,” he said.

The semifinal round will reduce the contenders to seven for the final competition in Naples, Fla., in April.

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