You are here: »
Home » Posts filed under steak
It's taken me a while to come round to the Argentinian approach to beef. An enthusiastic consumer of the dry-aged, US/European varieties, charcoal-grilled to perfection in London's best steakhouses (take a bow, Goodman and Hawksmoor), my experience of anything calling itself Argentinian was limited to chain pub steaks and the overpriced and mediocre Gaucho Grill. And so you can see why it was easier to think "Argentinian = cheap = bad" than entertain the idea that perhaps just because the cheapest steaks available in the UK were from Argentina, those were the ones most likely to be bought by the UK's worst restaurants.
But then, a couple of years back, I was invited to a friend's birthday meal in a little place near the Emirates stadium called Garufa, and halfway through a few hundred grams of ribeye that for once wasn't lowest-common-denominator menu filler, I finally started to understand what the deal was. Argentinian beef - good Argentinian beef - is lean and robust, with a gentle gamey flavour and very little of the buttery, minerally notes that characterised the dry-aged US and European cuts. If it helps, think of it as venison - the fresher the better, salted and seared over a parrilla, perfectly matched with a glass of Malbec. It's so different from traditional Western steakhouse steak it may as well come from a different animal, and once you release yourself from the idea that to be good a steak has to be cuttable with a butter knife and contain ribbons of yellow fat, there's plenty to enjoy.
Of course, you'll also need to find somewhere good to eat it. Garufin is to Garufa what Barrafina is to Fino, or Morito to Moro. Thanks to good pedigree and a light application of tasteful on-trend restaurant design (bare brick walls, uncomfortable seating, small plates, you know the drill) it manages to be buzzier, cheaper and more fun than the original, and is my new favourite work lunch spot. Providing you go easy on the booze you can walk away from a very decent meal for less than £20, and although the steaks are the real focus, there are enough interesting Argentinian specialities elsewhere on the menu to keep even the most demanding colleagues happy.
You know a place is going to be good when even something as simple as a tomato salad manages to impress. Crunchy and well-seasoned, underlined with a lovely smoked pepper sauce, the "Mixta" stands as proof that when restaurants get the basics right, it's that much easier for everything else to fall into place. Similarly, you may think it's not too difficult to mess up cheese croquettas, but numerous distressing experiences in lesser tapas bars across the city say otherwise; here a delicate crust contained strong provolone and the occasional toasted peanut, each sat on a light citrus dressing.
"Rescoldo" was perhaps the only dish I've tried at Garufin that I can't recommend. Consisting of slimy, underseasoned vegetables (some powerfully smoked) topped with a congealed slab of provolone, it was unbalanced and quite unpleasant, and though I can kind of see what they were getting at (a sort of Argentinian ratatouille) it needs a bit of a rethink. Their empanadas, though, were wonderful - particularly the spicy tripe & ox cheek one, a fluffy, crisp coating containing rich offal.
But to the main events. At £14.50, the "Lomo & caracu" is the single most expensive item on the menu, but fortunately was everything I was hoping it would be, a perfectly-seared chunk of tender fillet steak boasting that gentle gamey freshness, and marrow presented in a bisected bone for you to scoop out and eat with it. It's a lot for not a great deal of food, but if you ever needed convincing of the merits of Argentinian beef, it's a great place to start. And some Iberico pork, seared to medium and resting on a bed of creamy sweetcorn salsa, came with a black pudding croquetta - handily negating the need for me to order a separate side of black pudding croquettas. Because there was no way I was going to go to a restaurant serving black pudding croquettas and not order some black pudding croquettas.
The one dessert I've tried - cutely described as Dulche de Leche "Served in all its ways" was another heady helping of South American comfort food. I particularly liked the slices of banana with a DdL crust, and the excellent ice cream.
The fact that Garufin is less than 30 seconds walk from the office is, of course, a huge bonus to the restaurant desert that is Holborn/Bloomsbury and massively good news to me personally. But I'm sure that were it the other end of a 30 minute tube ride I would have been equally impressed by the cooking, the relentlessly friendly staff and the atmosphere of this welcoming little place. They are one of the first restaurants that really have a chance of convincing Londoners there's more to Argentinian beef - and Argentinian cuisine in general - than watery sirloin served at a 300% markup in the dark (yes I'm moaning about Gaucho again), but let's hope they won't be the last. If they can turn a die-hard dry-aged steak snob like me, they can turn anyone.
8/10
If you were to design a restaurant that ticks every box on the "London Restaurant Trends in 2012" list, where would you start? No reservations obviously, that goes without saying. You should describe yourself as a "pop up" too, even if you have no intention of ever "popping down". A no-choice menu, they're awfully trendy aren't they, printed on recycled paper in that typewriter font that Polpo use, and absolutely no currency symbols. There should be a cocktail bar serving drinks in wildly unsuitable glassware, tables should be uncomfortably close together, and make sure you have as much exposed brick and bare light bulbs as possible. Once all the above is in place, then it hardly matters what the food is like does it? They'll be queuing down the street.
Sigh
Flat Iron is an operation so desperately on-trend in so many ways it's almost a parody. There's the tin cups of popcorn from Spuntino; the huge block of ice behind the bar from MeatEasy; the juleps in metal cups from Hawksmoor. There isn't a single item of décor or presentational quirk that hasn't been "researched" (ie. nicked) from somewhere else; even the waiting staff's outfits looked rather familiar. All of which would be excusable, of course - deeply irritating, but excusable - if the One Thing they have on their menu - the titular Flat Iron steak, a cut from the featherblade - was any good. It isn't.
Before I get to that though, a couple of things that weren't terrible. The chips were quite good - cooked in meaty dripping, nice and crispy, and a pretty generous portion for £2.50 - sorry I mean "2.5". There's a decent beer list, too, consisting of bottles from the London Fields brewery (uber-localism is fashionable, after all) as well as the always-popular Brewdog. And service, from an efficient gaggle of attractive twentysomethings, was spot-on, meaning despite everything I was quite happy to pay the automatically-added service charge.
But oh dear, the steak. First of all, it had a very unpleasant smell, sort of a cross between a cowpat and a high street butchers. I'm not entirely sure why, but perhaps I'd rather remain in the dark on that. It had also, I think, been slow-cooked in some kind of waterbath as the colour was uniform inside, a common shortcut in lesser steakhouses that need to churn out hundreds of dishes an hour with inadequate grilling facilities, but still annoying. But usually, even when rubbish restaurants sous-vide their steak, they at least finish it off over charcoal to provide a bit of texture and a nice smoky flavour. Not so here as far as I can tell - they arrived soft and gelatinous inside and out, admittedly tender but with no crust and no sign it had been anywhere near a flame. And why provide a (grubby) ironic butcher's cleaver as a steak knife if you're going to slice up the meat before serving it anyway?
"But it's only £10" I can hear you say. "What did you expect?" Well, yes it is only a tenner, far less than you'd pay for the cheapest steak on the menu anywhere else, and on the face of it quite a bargain. But it's a false economy. This was a bland, incompetently cooked bit of cheap meat - why pay £10 for a deeply unsatisfying steak when you can either pay more for a good one, or eat something else entirely? Except, at Flat Iron you can't because steak is all they do. Because no-choice menus are trendy.
It wasn't just the steak that irritated, though. The tables all seated about 12 people so if you turn up as a couple (and as you can't reserve, most people do) there's a good chance you'll end up sat between two complete strangers, sharing your conversation as well as your elbow space as the distance to your friend opposite is slightly too big for confidentiality. And each of the cocktails we ordered - a Bramble infused with thyme (for some reason) and the house julep - were very sweet although I'm willing to admit they might have been OK if you like sweet cocktails.
Of course, inevitably, depressingly, Shoreditch is lapping it up. The queue trailed out the door by the time we'd paid up (the best part of £25/head once a cocktail and portion of chips each had been added) and plenty more hipster types were milling about in the bar area waiting for spaces. In this most slavishly trend-conscious part of town it seems few can resist the lure of somewhere that so expertly, if so cynically, gives people just what they want - the illusion of an "underground" discovery, the lengthy queue, the bragging rights of securing an oversubscribed table, the cocktail served in a jam jar. As for what happens when you sit down to eat, well, who cares about that?
3/10
How hard is it to make a Yorkshire pudding? It must be fiendishly difficult because I've yet to find one in London worth eating in nearly a decade of trying, and I've tried at some fairly expensive places. My grandma, back in the day, used to make a brilliant Yorkshire pudding, so I can only assume she was some kind of undercover culinary genius and was holding secret gastronomic masterclasses in between watching Countdown and checking her pools numbers. If the only Yorkshire pudding I've ever had in my life that was any good was cooked by an octogenarian in a small kitchen in Maghull then what's everyone else's excuse? My grandma is a better chef than most in London. That's the only explanation.
OK so yes, I am being facetious, I admit it. But come on guys, it's fried batter. If you can't make a good Yorkshire pudding then firstly you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself but more importantly, don't even try. And how to tell when you can't make a good Yorkshire pudding? Easy. It may be one of the following - cold, chewy, dry, tasteless and bready. Or, it will be all of these at once, like the Yorkshire pudding I had at the Tramshed last night.
It came with a teeny bowl of the fancy-sounding "whipped chicken livers" but which was actually a very ordinary and slightly bitter chicken liver pate, and one that had been left hanging around for a bit as well because it had started to discolour on the outside. Also as part of the trio of starters was a couple of thin slices of very ordinary smoked salmon topped with remarkably bland shaved fennel, and a plate of underseasoned beetroot puree with a few roast walnuts and boiled beets scattered on top. It is both my privilege and my curse as a food blogger that I can point to other restaurants that do most of the above much better, but perhaps it's unfair to compare. For £8 a head it was an interesting selection of starters, at least on paper; it was just a shame none of it tasted very good.
A 250g steak - there was no choice offered of cut, just "sirloin" so I don't know what happens to the rest of the cow - was actually pretty good. I liked the charcoal-char on the outside and it was nicely medium rare, so it just about justified the £20. Chicken though was bizarre, and I don't just mean the way it was served on a spike with its legs in the air. The flavour was incredibly chicken-y. That sounds like a good thing, but let me explain. It was far too chicken-y. Suspiciously chicken-y. A kind of super-concentrated stock-cube chicken flavour, chemically powerful and deeply unnerving. The same flavour infested the chips, which were nicely fried but had been treated, so we were told, in the "chicken dripping". "These taste," said my friend after chewing thoughtfully on one for a few moments, "like Walkers Roast Chicken flavour crisps". I'm not accusing the Tramshed of using stock cubes or artificial flavours of any kind, it just really, really tasted like they had.
Desserts were less troubling, but no better than the starters. A chocolate mousse was a one-dimensional lump of whipped chocolate and fine only in the sense that there aren't very many reasons why you wouldn't want to eat some chocolate. Apple pie and custard was equally uninspiring - the best you could say about it was that it was edible, so it did get eaten. But I wouldn't want to do it again.
Perhaps Mark Hix gaffs just aren't for me. I know he has his fans, and indeed a few people responded to my tweet about the disastrous Yorkshire pudding that theirs had been fine. Maybe some people would like their chickens to taste like they'd been dipped in a vat of Knorr as well, or their fries to taste like something from a packet. Maybe these places are more about the attitude, the atmosphere and the buzz than anything that ends up on a plate. But we honestly didn't enjoy ourselves at the Tramshed, and though that may have partially been due to the fact the room was baking hot (there's no air conditioning, and only a few lucky tables have fans directed towards them) mainly it was because most of what we ate veered between boring and bizarre and managed to cost £88 with only 3 glasses of wine. And for all those reasons, not least the terrible Yorkshire pudding, I don't think I'll be back.
4/10
Here's a question for any of you that might call yourselves Londoners: Have you ever been to Buckingham Palace? I don't mean cycled past it on the way to work or seen it blur past from the back of a black cab at midnight; I mean actually stood outside those gates, watched the changing of the guard, asked a stranger to take a photo of yourself grinning like an idiot and throwing a double "peace" sign. No? What about Madame Tussauds or the London Planetarium? The London Dungeon? Have you ever sat on one of those big lions in Trafalgar Square or congregated around the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus?
I have never done any of these things. I can tell you the best place to grab a cocktail in Shoreditch or the quickest way of getting from Holborn to Victoria in rush hour (walk down to Temple and get the District Line; the queues to get into Holborn station are crazy now they've shut down one of the Piccadilly Line escalators) but I live my life so far removed from "tourist" London that the two may as well be in a different continent. If you live here, you will avoid the Big Sights partly because they're so bloody expensive (each of the paying attractions above is likely to set you back at least £20) but partly because you just think, well, they're always there, I'll get round to them eventually. And somehow you never do. There is London and there is Tourist London and never the twain shall meet.
The Rainforest Café sits in the very money-grabbing, souvenir-pushing, cynical heart of Tourist London, physically (it's right underneath the Trocadero, steps away from Piccadilly Circus) as well as metaphorically. At least at the otherwise execrable Hard Rock Café you are only strongly encouraged to wait for your table in the gift shop next door; here you must navigate vast piles of lurid furry toys and tubs of bouncy balls and oversized pencils before you even get so far as the bar. The bar, by the way, contains only nailed-down plastic stools shaped into the bottom half of different animals and are rigidly contoured so you are forced to sit in a particular direction - the effect of which is a winning combination of both humiliating and uncomfortable, though still not quite as humiliating and uncomfortable as paying £7.50 for a sickeningly sweet Margarita containing premade sour mix.
It's probably about time I spoke about the décor. Whilst most "themed" restaurants are content with a bit of vaguely appropriate tat on the walls and dressing their staff up in silly costumes, the Rainforest Café resembles the queuing area of a 20-year-old family-friendly ride at a faded seaside resort, complete with animatronic animals, sound effects, water features and various misshapen fiberglass sculptures attempting to mimic tree trunks and rock formations. At one time, presumably not long after it opened all the way back in 1994, I imagine it would have looked, if not attractive in the traditional sense, then at least impressive - animatronic gorillas don't come cheap, and neither do aquariums or fake waterfalls. Now, though, the plastic foliage hanging from the ceiling is grey with 18 years of accumulated dust, a good number of the oversized butterflies have stopped flapping their wings, and the water features emit a strange, sad smell of chlorine and school showers.
Of the food, I wish it had either been a lot better, so that I would have felt more comfortable about the bill, or a lot worse, so that I could have at least had more fun writing it up. As it is, most was just very standard Brakes Bros commodity reheat-and-forget things like chicken wings and burgers, none of it inedible but none of it anywhere near worth the money. The best was my steak, which as you can probably tell even from my rubbish photo, was precisely medium-rare with a good crust, well seasoned and a nice thick slab of decent enough cow. Fries were just oven chips with an odd taste, and all the salads seemed to have been "dressed" in nothing more than BBQ sauce, but the beef itself was fine and I even didn't mind the packet peppercorn goo. £22, mind.
By way of a contrast, the worst dish that arrived at our table was a "Mexican Quesadilla", at £14.95 probably the most expensive cheese and bean wrap in the country, no better than anything you could pick up from Pret for a couple of quid and tasting of wallpaper paste in between two pieces of cardboard. And a lamb shank (£16.95) was yet more frozen meat, slow cooked for aeons just so people can say the meat "fell off the bone" as if that's anything to be pleased about.
But the Rainforest Café, I hear you say, isn't for me. It's all very well sitting there taking pictures and moaning about the wipe-clean tablecloths but surely the real test of a theme restaurant is if its real target audience - children - enjoy it. And indeed the happy gaggle of under-12s we brought along last night certainly seemed to enjoy themselves at the time, colouring in their menus and racing around the robo-Gorillas and fish tanks between courses. But once it was all over and we had escaped the fake thunderstorms and furry toys, even these impressionable young minds couldn't stay convinced with the food - ribs were "good but not chewy enough", in "way too much BBQ sauce, which was too sweet". Jelly (desserts were included in the £12 kids menu, about the only thing at Rainforest Café that even nodded towards good value) was "too sweet and too thick", and the vanilla ice cream on top was "horrid". Burgers were better ("I like burgers") and there weren't as many complaints about the Sundaes as the jelly, but even so, I got the very strong impression they'd have been just as happy if not happier at McDonalds, which wouldn't have cost £200 for 3 and 4 halves.
Ah yes, the bill. The food was poor and expensive but the real sting in the tail of last night was some truly eye-watering mark-ups on alcohol. A teeny 125ml glass of watery house chardonnay was £5, and a bottle of 3.8% Carlsberg was an incredible £4.50 - that's more than the cost of a pint of export-strength lager even from a West End pub. And perhaps we could have gone a little easier on the booze but you try having a meal in the middle of a dusty fiberglass rainforest and see how long you can last before gasping for a drink. Each of the adults had one main course, shared a portion of mediocre chicken wings and had 4 drinks each and managed to spend £50 a head. As we paid up and left, I couldn't help noticing how the shrieks and hoots of recorded jungle noises increasingly sounded like jeers and mocking laughter.
This is an Olympic year - it is not just depressing but potentially incredibly damaging that, with the world's spotlight on London, places like this continue to trade. I know I'm repeating myself and I know we've been here before, God knows I've shouted myself hoarse about Aberdeen Angus and Hard Rock Café and they're both still making a killing so you may ask what's the point in getting worked up about it again. The fact is though, along with every other sentient being that takes the slightest bit of pride in the city he's chosen to call his home, I care about what our guests think of our food, and I want as many people as possible to eat well. And Rainforest Café and their ilk are nothing more than vast confidence tricks specifically tailored towards naive visitors who haven't the energy or the resources or confidence to go anywhere else. I'm one of the lucky ones - I crossed over to Tourist London for one evening, hated it, and scurried quickly back. But what if Tourist London was all you ever saw? Can we really blame the UK's poor reputation for food on lazy tourists, or is this like blaming landmine victims for not looking where they're walking?
I don't really know what the solution is. Short of standing outside the Rainforest Café with a sandwich board reading "Go Somewhere Else", we can't stop the uninformed spending their money there, just as we can't stop people going to see films starring Matthew McConaughey or voting Conservative. In a free country and a free economy, people are free to make a living ripping other people off - always have, always will. But it doesn't mean we have to like it, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't scream from the highest rooftops when we see such things going on. So this is my rooftop and, Rainforest Café, consider yourself well and truly screamed at.
1/10
Many thanks to Esme (12) and Elia (10) (and father Osh), and Mathilde (7) and Fred (11) (and father Bob) for subjecting themselves to Death By Fiberglass.
A couple of weeks after suffering at the hands of a huge, geographically vague menu at Cha Cha Moon, here we are in a brand new restaurant in Kings Cross that has exactly the same problem. Look at the size of it - Brunch, Lunch, Larder, Hot Starters, Wood-fired Oven, Not Wood-fired Oven (weirdly), Puddings, Ices, it goes on and on and on. And I can see why they wouldn't want to lump quite so many items under anything so prosaic as "Starters" and "Mains" but how the hell am I supposed to know which of "Speck & pickled quince" or "Vegetables a la grecque" - both filed under "Larder" - are big enough for a starter without guessing based on their price?
Karpo is also billed as an American-style diner, but despite the appearance of a burger, "Shrimp & grits" and a Macaroni cheese, the rest of the dishes seem to hail from more or less anywhere. There's risotto with buffalo mozzarella, sourdough toast with Gentleman's Relish, a fish taco (lunchtime only) and Omelette Arnold Bennett (for breakfast). It is usually a good idea to be wary of anywhere trying to master too many cuisines under one roof, so first impressions of Karpo, not helped by the strangely soulless décor (complete with walls of plastic ivy), are not great. In that case, why did I end up enjoying myself so much?
Perhaps because, unlike Cha Cha Moon, the food at Karpo is worth the effort. The menu may be confusing and way too big but everything we ate was at least good, and occasionally very good. A trio of things on sourdough toast - whipped lardo, white bean purée and aforementioned "Gentleman's relish" (not out of a little white tub but made in-house) were all lovely - bursting with flavour and freshness. Speck with pickled quince was only adequate - I always think restaurants have something to hide when they serve their supposedly premium ham with fancy distractions - but was at least a generous portion for your £7 and disappeared quickly.
"Southern-fried quail" was as good as you'd hope, remarkably moist inside for what can be a dry bird and cleverly butchered so as to remove all but the biggest bones and sinew. It came with an astonishingly good celeriac slaw which cut through the ever-so-slightly-too-greasy quail and the breadcrumb coating on the meat contained a very commendable go at the familiar Southern-Fried mix of herbs and spices. I'd like to see the range of deep-fried poultry at Karpo expanded, based on this example.
The one main-sized dish we tried, a hanger steak with bone marrow and shallots, was also very decent. Seared deftly to rare and enhanced rather than swamped by the addition of rich marrow and caramelised roast shallots, it wasn't perhaps the hugest portion for £15 but you couldn't fault anything else about it. Boston Baked Beans were more generously pitched at £3.5 for a fairly large bowl and were just as rich and satisfying as the ones I'd ordered from a BBQ place in Boston a couple of years back, so no complaints there either. And Hasselback potatoes were a more interesting alternative to roasties and had a great flavour.
I wish we'd had more room to try some of the more interesting baked goods (Karpo do Macaroons as well as Eccles cakes and fresh cookies) but we just about managed to squeeze in a small bowl of assorted ices; all very good but I was particularly taken by a shocking pink rhubarb sorbet which is my hot tip if you go to yourself and fancy a dessert.
There will be those who find it easier to find fault with Karpo than I do; it's hardly a budget option, I've mentioned my issues with the overlong menu and the unfriendly décor, and indeed my friend wasn't taken at all - "like eating in a shopping centre" she said. But if you choose wisely enough (and make the most of the lovely staff to help you on this front), enjoy the great wine list with its healthy number of rare biodynamic and organic options (we had some lovely examples by the glass but don't expect me to tell you which - one was an Alsace Riesling I think) and start with a cold martini, there's a very good chance you'll come away happy.
7/10
I was invited to review Karpo
EDIT: I'm reliably informed that Karpo actually contains real ivy, not fake. Happy to put the record straight on this!
