T he thing is, you just cannot beat a truly great
steak. I think if I knew that my next meal would be my last, I would ask for a truly great steak. I know this is unfair on the pig. The pig gives us so much: pork, ham, sausages, bacon, Babe, gammon, salami, Charlotte’s Web, pork pies, chitterlings, scratchings and so on and so on. But you just cannot beat a truly great steak. I feel bad for the pig, who asks for so little in return, but I guess when it comes down to it you just can’t beat a prime cut of cow’s rump.
For some reason, unlike Paris, say, or New York, London has no famed steakhouses, unless you count the Aberdeen Angus chain, which no one in their right mind would. There are restaurants where you can get truly great steak, mostly the top-end French ones, but no place that says, ‘Hey, we do truly great steak and truly great steak is what we do.’ However, that said, I’ve yet to try the Gaucho Grill, the Argentinian steak chain that began with one restaurant in Piccadilly ten years ago but has since spawned (calved?) six others in London and one in Manchester. (It should not, by the way, be confused with the Groucho Club, which is also full of cows, but they’re quite old and leathery and you’re not allowed to slaughter them, alas.) Anyway, the Gaucho Grill must be doing something right in the cow’s rump department, or so you would think, so I’m happy to give it a go.
We go to the Hampstead branch. It is quite themey from the off: door handles in the shape of horns, cowskin upholstery, that kind of thing. I expect the staff to all be in Annie Get Your Gun get-ups with, possibly, the kitchen operating via lassoes, but they are not. Instead, they are wearing very strange uniforms that make them look part Maoist and part strait-jacketed nuts recruited from the local funny farm. Weird. The menus are novelty menus, being about 18 inches long, a couple of inches wide, and concertina-ing out several times like peculiarly etiolated accordions. I’m sure such menus seemed like a funky idea at the time, but they are excessively annoying: wilful, unpredictable, snapping back or jumping across the table as soon as you take your eye off them.
But whether a menu is irritatingly gimmicky or not, it is always nice to be able to read it, and I cannot. The restaurant is terribly dim — with extremely loud Muzak — and our table is in the dimmest spot. I ask the waitress if we might move to the next table, which is not only vacant but also directly under some lights. She returns with a torch and some useful advice that amounts to: ‘Use this.’ Did you get that? SHE RETURNS WITH A TORCH AND SAYS: ‘USE THIS!’ I note, later, that all the other diners are quite young and cool and prosperous-looking — they look like those creepy twentysomething estate agents who go about cutting you up in their customised Mini Coopers — so maybe the restaurant wants to put us, a middle-aged couple with a teenage kid, where we can’t be seen. I’m getting the feeling I always get in Topshop, which is: I wish she’d stop embarrassing herself and just go to Wallis.
I don’t want to make a fuss ... well, I do, but I can’t because the teenage kid has said, ‘Mum, you do not want to make a fuss’, and he is now taller than me and quite frightening. So we stay put with our little torch. I haven’t felt as foolish since the time I put my pants on sideways and wondered all day why they felt so odd. I already don’t like this place and hope it burns in hell, but I can smell that great steak smell — farmy, earthy, juicy, meaty, primal. I’m staying. I’ve got a torch and I am very old, but I’m staying.
Before we order, the waitress shows us or as much as anyone can show you something in the dark — their main cuts of beef (rump, sirloin, fillet, rib-eye) raw on a wooden platter to help you select size (225g, 300g, 400g) and fat content (beautifully marbled sirloins; leaner, browner fillets). The prices are highish but not too bad £10.50 for the smallest sirloin, for example, and £14.50 for the fillet. The beef is Argentinian, comes only from ‘young steers that have feasted on the lush, rich grass of the Argentine pampas’, is aged for four to six weeks, and cooked on an open grill, turning only the once. Bring it on!
Starters? Don’t bother. My salmon ceviche (£8) is a few limp slices of pasty salmon scattered begrudgingly with a few rings of chilli. It tastes of nothing going nowhere fast. My son’s Peruvian ceviche (£8) with octopus and prawns is so ferociously and eye-wateringly citrus that it is actually inedible. My partner does better with a nice plump chorizo sausage (£6.50) which, as my son and I ordered so badly, he would be happy to share if he weren’t so keen on keeping it all for himself — ‘Keep off, keep off. Is it my fault you ordered so badly?’ I think that at one point my fork gets him in the thigh. It’s the lighting. Oh goody, here come our steaks!
Now, when I say ‘truly great steak’, what do I mean exactly? The beef has to be firstclass, of course, and properly aged and hung. It has to be cooked rare. That goes without saying. It has to be crusty and slightly salty on the outside, but all pink and juicy and tender and almost satin-like inside. It should cut like butter. If you need a steak knife to cut a steak, then that is one tough steak. A truly great steak can almost be eaten with a spoon. And the steak here? I’ve chosen the fillet, although I actually regret doing so as my partner’s sirloin, with its crispy fat edges, looks rather better — ‘Keep off, keep off!’ My fillet is very, very, very good, though. No steak knife needed; none provided. It is crusty and salty on the outside, and all sweet and satiny within. You can practically taste the pampas. I eat it all up greedily, juices dribbling down my chin. It’s a great steak, but truly great?
No. But this has less to do with the meat actually (I think you’d be hard-pressed to find better meat) than the fact that the restaurant just doesn’t work for me. Would I come again? No. I don’t like the chain feeling (see also Pizza Express, Café Rouge, Loch Fyne, etc.) and the fact that it doesn’t run on someone’s individual passion. Some of the prices seem rip-off high, like £3.50 for a side dish of four mushrooms. I don’t like the silly menus. I don’t like being made to feel uncomfortable. I don’t like dining by torchlight. Pity, but there you have it. If I knew that my next meal would be my last, I just wouldn’t come here.
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