I adore beef tartar. But I'm scared to prepare it myself.
And you would trust a restaurant to make it for you?
I used to eat raw beef while my Mom was making things, and she'd slap be, and tell me I could get sick. This was long before we would hear about people dying, sometimes a number of them, from some bad strain of E. coli in some ground meat, from some meat processing plant in particular. I have been grinding my own meat for many years, and just rinse the meat off, and dry it, before cutting into chunks to grind. And something I learned when I first started grinding - how much fat is in store-bought ground beef! I read
somewhere that I had to add 10% of the fat I trimmed off the meat back into the lean meat (which, of course, still had some fat), or it would be too "dry". Yet when I cooked the meat in a pot, when making some meat sauce, or a chili, it would be totally dry, and no fat cooked out! Yet the "92% lean" beef that I'd buy, still had some fat cook out. What does this tell you about those percentages they give on the meat?
I haven't eaten any raw for a long time, but another thing about having to grind it yourself is the fat content. You basically have to remove as much as you can, since when eating it raw, that fat will give like a waxy feeling in your mouth, which is not a good thing.
I've always liked very rare beef, and with burgers, I have to grind it myself, as I won't make rare ones with store-bought.