Steak Buffet Singapore: Why Armoury Is Upgrading to MB2+ Australian Black Angus

8 hours ago
4 min read

From 1 August 2026, the Armoury Steak Buffet moves from $38++ to $50++ per person. Every serving is now a 200g centre-cut MB2+ Australian Black Angus ribeye instead of a 150g New Zealand Angus cut — still free-flow, still with free-flow sides. We raised the price because we raised the beef, not because we shrank the plate.

We built Singapore's free-flow steak buffet. Now we're rebuilding it.

When Armoury Steakhouse opened in 2015 at South Beach — on the site of the old Singapore Volunteer Corps armoury — nobody in Singapore was serving free-flow steak. Buffets meant carving stations and chafing dishes. Steakhouses meant a single plated cut and a bill to match. There was no third option.

We made one. The Armoury Steak Buffet (2017) put a proper grill cut, cooked to order, on a free-flow format — and it's the same instinct that later gave Singapore the BIG CUT, our large-format sharing steak.

Nine years on, the free-flow steak category has copies. Most of them compete by going down: thinner cuts, leaner grades, secondary muscles dressed up as ribeye, portions that shrink quietly while the price holds. That race has an ending, and it isn't a good one for anyone eating.

We're going the other way.

What changes on 1 August 2026

	Legacy Steak Buffet (until 31 Jul 2026)	Upgraded Steak Buffet (from 1 Aug 2026)
Price	$38++ per person	$50++ per person
Cut	NZ Angus ribeye & striploin	MB2+ Australian Black Angus ribeye
Portion	~150g per serving	200g centre-cut per serving
Format	Free-flow, cooked to order	Free-flow, cooked to order
Sides	Free-flow, included	Free-flow, included
500g single-cut upgrade	—	+$8 (min. 2 pax on the buffet)

Why MB2+ Australian Black Angus is a real upgrade, not a menu rewrite

Marbling — the intramuscular fat threaded through the muscle, not the fat trimmed off the edge — is what separates a steak you finish from a steak you remember. Australian beef is graded on the AUS-MEAT marbling scale, and MB2+ sits meaningfully above the ungraded and lean-grass-fed product that most buffet formats in Singapore run on.

That fat does three things when it hits a hot grill:

It bastes the muscle from the inside. As the intramuscular fat renders, it lubricates the fibres, which is why a well-marbled ribeye stays tender at medium-rare where a lean cut turns tight.
It carries flavour. Beef flavour compounds are fat-soluble. Less fat, less to taste — which is why lean cuts lean so hard on sauce.
It forgives. A marbled cut has a wider window between "perfect" and "overdone," which matters enormously in a free-flow service where the kitchen is firing continuously.

New Zealand Angus is honest beef and excellent lean protein. But it was always the wrong tool for what we were trying to do on the grill.

Why 200g, and why thickness is the whole argument

This is the part most people miss, so we'll be specific.

A steak needs thermal mass to be seared properly. Our grill runs hot enough to drive the Maillard reaction — the browning chemistry that builds crust, char and roasted-beef aroma. Crust formation takes time on the surface. Heat takes time to travel to the core.

At 150g, those two clocks run at nearly the same speed. By the time a crust develops, the centre is already past medium-rare. So thin cuts get pulled early and served pale, or they get seared properly and served grey. There's no third outcome.

At 200g centre-cut, the geometry works in our favour. There's enough mass between the surface and the core that our kitchen can commit to a hard, high-temperature sear — deep caramelised crust on the outside, warm red centre inside. The portion increase isn't generosity theatre. It's what makes the cooking possible.

Why we raised the price instead of quietly cutting the plate

Every restaurant facing beef costs has three options. Cut the portion. Cut the grade. Or charge what the beef costs.

The first two are invisible for about six months, which is exactly why they're popular. We've watched buffet formats in this city drop from ribeye to chuck-eye, from 200g to "unlimited" plates that arrive at 90g, from cooked-to-order to pre-seared and reheated. Guests notice eventually. They just don't come back to tell you.

We'd rather post the number.

$50++ per person for free-flow MB2+ Australian Black Angus ribeye at 200g a serving — with free-flow sides — is priced honestly against what that beef costs us. It also aligns the buffet with the standard on our à la carte menu, which is where it should have been all along. One kitchen, one standard, two formats.

How much steak is that, actually?

Most guests on our buffet settle around two servings — roughly 400g of ribeye — before the sides catch up with them. At $50++, that's premium graded Australian ribeye at a price per 100g t

hat's difficult to beat anywhere on Orchard Road, before you count the free-flow sides.

If you'd rather have your beef in one piece than in rounds, take the 500g single-cut upgrade for an additional $8 — a proper thick BIG CUT-style slab, rested and sliced at the table. It needs a minimum of two people on the buffet to unlock one upgrade.