Here’s all the stuff about Craftsteak — Tom Colicchio’s 10,000-squarefoot steakhouse that recently opened in the meatpacking district — that you don’t really care about: The raw bar offers an excellent array of oysters ($3 each), ranging from briny Malpeques to cucumbery Watch Hills. The wine list is massive, although I suggest going with the Rogue Hazelnut Brown Ale, which is available on tap. The opulent dining room, with its wide banquettes and numerous modern touches, is miles away from the clubby, old-money steakhouse norm. Service is uniformly excellent, and the raspberry napoleon, the chocolate soufflé, and the petit fours are all lovely.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the meat. And there’s a lot to talk about, because Craftsteak is at the forefront of a new school of thought about steak. It’s a school that treats beef like fine wine or single-malt Scotch, complete with all the information overload about process and provenance. It’s no longer enough to know that you like, say, a dry-aged USDA Prime ribeye.Now you’re also expected to know — or to want to know — how long it’s been aged, which breed of steer it came from, the name and location of the farm where it was raised, what it was fed, and how old and how heavy it was when it was slaughtered. In short, this is meat for steak geeks.

Most of these variables come into play on Craftsteak’s menu, which practically requires a cattle ranching background to decipher. You say want a steak? Here are your choices: corn-fed Black Angus; corn-fed Hereford from the RR Ranch; corn-fed Hereford from Ridgefield Farm in South Dakota, dry-aged for your choice of four, five, six, seven, or eight weeks; grass-fed Angus from Hawaii; Wagyu (the same breed used for Kobe beef, but it can’t be called Kobe unless it’s raised in Japan) from Snake River Farm in Idaho; and Wagyu from Blackmore Ranch in Australia. Toss in the various cuts available for each of these meats and you’ve got 20 different steak options.

Compare that to Peter Luger, where your choices are steak for two, steak for three, or steak for four — all dry-aged porterhouse, and never mind where it came from — and it’s clear that Craftsteak is rewriting the book.

But are there really significant flavor distinctions among these different beef options? Or is this all a bunch of pretentious claptrap designed to justify higher menu prices and make customers feel sophisticated? I recently took a small group to Craftsteak to find out. In order to compare apples to apples, we ordered a trio of 12-ounce New York strips, all medium-rare: corn-fed Hereford, dry-aged for seven weeks ($60); grass-fed Hawaiian Angus ($44); and Idaho Wagyu ($98), graded at no. 8 on the Kobe/Wagyu 12-point scale (to put this in perspective, USDA Prime is considered roughly no. 5).

“That’s a great order,”our waiter said.”You’re going to have three very different steak experiences.”

This turned out to be a slight overstatement.The grass-fed steak did have a slightly vegetal, herbaceous undertone to its flavor profile, and it definitely ranked as the best piece of grass-fed beef I’ve ever eaten. But the real differences turned out to textural: The grass-fed steak was the chewiest (not in a bad way — it was firm but not tough), the Wagyu was the tenderest, and the corn-fed Hereford fell somewhere in between. Compared to these distinctions, the flavor differences were minimal.

In fact, the most notable thing about the steaks’ flavor was what they were lacking: char. Restaurant steaks are typically either grilled or broiled, but these appeared to have been baked.There were no blackened grill marks, no charred outer crust, and consequently none of that delicious, slightly bitter counterpoint that’s usually provided by a steak’s exterior.It made for a frustrating eating experience — I kept trying bite after bite, thinking the next forkful would have a bit of the blackened meat I was craving. But alas, that bite never came.

And it wasn’t just me — my companions had the same reaction. Puzzled and unsatisfied, we asked our waiter how the steaks had been cooked. “They’re roasted at low temperatures,” he replied. “The chef thinks it’s gentler on the meat that way.”

It may be gentle, but the results bear little resemblance to most people’s idea of good steak. Couldn’t they at least have given the beef a quick stovetop sear, to create a crispy exterior, before popping it in the oven? That’s pretty standard practice when roasting a good piece of meat. When we suggested this to our waiter, he looked horrified.

Almost everything else at Craftsteak is terrific. But there’s no getting around it: A steakhouse that serves mediocre steak — no matter what its provenance — is a failure.There’s a reason why meat and fire are considered such a classic combination. By taking the fire out of the equation, Craftsteak has engaged in an ill-advised attempt to reinvent a wheel that was turning just fine on its own.And no amount of grass-fed, dry-aged hullabaloo can change that.

Craftsteak, 85 Tenth Ave. at 15th Street, 212-780-0880.