I noticed in a breakdown video while butchering a cow. Is it due to fibers being more stringy after being cooked? My other thought is the temperature of the meat.
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Serrated teeth cut efficiently for much longer without needing to be sharpened. They can use them for months without any maintenance other than cleaning. A straight blade would need to be sharpened regularly.
Edit: there’s also the fact that when being served at a restaurant you use the knife on a plate. Ceramic or porcelain. This will dull knives far quicker than a butcher block or proper cutting board.
Edit 2: the butcher is also going to get a nicer finish on his cuts, making it easier to sell a $25 steak. If you’re cutting it yourself to stuff it into your maw you’re not gonna care if the cut isn’t super pretty.
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Raw meat is a lot easier to cut especially when a lot of people order their steaks overcooked. It’s takes very little time to keep a knife sharp, they aren’t letting them go dull before they are honed back to a fine edge.
Even smooth knife edges are serrated, just on a microscopic scale (they’re called burrs though). That said, “smooth” edges slice flesh cleanly and aestheticslly but those knives wear faster. Serrated knives are easier for home use because they rarely need to be sharpened if ever, and cut small portions of meat efficiently.
Modern steak knives are designed to be cheap to manufacture. It’s way easier to put serrations on a stainless blade than a decent bevel that has to be sharpened.
Straight knives are easier to clean and sharpen and cut more neatly. Serrated knives saw the meat and are much harder to blunt or cut yourself with for the same cutting power. Like a saw versus a knife for wood.
Steak knives can also be straight edge instead of serrated. Restaurants and others usually just go with the other kind because you won’t typically sharpen them and they could last longer.
Proper steak knives – like you might get at a fancy steak house restaurant are often not serrated. As other mentioned, they are much sharped but needs to be sharpened/maintained. Butchers are often looking for clean cuts as in separating the different parts of the animal as close to perfect as they can like *that* particular muscle. And then the “sawing” would destroy a bit of it. So the sharper the better, but again, needs to be maintained. Thats why you see butchers sharpening their knives before cutting, and in between animals as well. It goes “blunt” quite quickly – but also is quite quick to sharpen if you have the right knives/tools
Similar to a doctor cutting in humans, they are looking for clean cuts. So they will “always” use a brand new/sharpened non-serrated knife to make the cleanest possible cuts in the skin/muscles.
tl;dr serrated blades are easier but not as good
You can easily get serrations on a blade with a single pass of a grinder. Even if you don’t have those fancy multi-bevel serrations just putting a bunch of jagged edges on the metal will make it cut decently.
The tiny jagged edges catch on to the meat and rip them out, the same way a saw does. The two big downsides are that it leaves jagged cuts instead of nice smooth ones and, once a serrated knife does get dull, it’s much more annoying to resharpen.
If you want a smooth edge, you need to start with good steel. It doesn’t need to be super fancy but if it’s too soft any edge will just disappear really fast. Then you need to carefully grind that edge down with successively finer grits and maintain a really steady angle while you do it.
That gets you kitchen knives that can cut like razor blades. If you just touch them to meat it cuts right through. It lets you make really smooth cuts and that gives you much more control.
With a sharp knife you can delicately separate connective tissue from muscle. You can take large muscle bundles and easily cut along the fibers to separate them into individual muscles. You can cut paper thin slices of meat. When it gets a little dull you can easily re-hone it or even re-sharpen it.
When you eat a steak, you use the knife to saw back and fourth to cut off a piece. Butchers knives are so sharp they can do it in one swing.
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