Great steak
Friday, 28th April 2006 by JulieTom and I celebrated our 9th wedding anniversary this week with a trip to The Gaucho Grill. These guys are renowned for their steaks but we had a feeling they wouldn’t come cheap so we were saving them for a special occasion.
There are a number of Gaucho Grills around London these days; the one we went to is about 10 minutes walk from Tom’s work, in Chancery Lane. For us, only their reputation preceded them, but it turns that their menu and style is Argentinian.
You know a restaurant takes their steak seriously when the waiter comes over with a wooden board decorated with 5 raw steaks while you’re looking at the menu; and proceeds to describe (in heavily-accented English) the pros and cons of each cut of meat!
One that looked particularly interesting was the Argentinian specialty Churrasco de lomo which is a “spiral cut fillet”, marinated for 24 hours. (All their steaks are proudly proclaimed as Argentinian beef so no getting away from the food miles on these babies.)
With that new information on board, we returned to our perusal of the menu. Unlike some steak places, Gaucho’s do have a wide range of alternatives, but we were there for the steak so we didn’t linger over the other pages as we nibbled on the tasty bread they brought to keep us going.
Considering how much we were likely to manage, we chose to share a fillet – small, 225g – and their Churrasco de lomo which only has one size of 300g. To go with that, we opted for a blue cheese sauce and some creamed spinach. And an Argentinian Cabernet to complement it all.
The Churrasco de lomo was definitely the star of the show. A flat strip of meat, it was fantastically tender – everything you could ask for in a steak. And the blue cheese sauce was delicious! We could have used two of those. The plain fillet wasn’t as impressive after the churrasco in that it had some fairly chewy areas despite being rare. But still well better than average for a London steak and we devoured the lot.
We were more than happy to look at the dessert menu when it came around. Earlier we’d spotted whisky Don Pedro on the menu – something that we’d never seen in London except at restaurants serving South African food. I think we now have a better idea where this South African favourite orignated from! (If you haven’t met it, this is a sweet combination of blended ice cream and shot of whisky / Kahlua served in a glass.)
So Tom had the don pedro, and I had the Argentinian pancakes with vanilla ice cream and dulce de leche. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect for the dulce de leche, but guessed it was some form of caramel. And that was exactly it, just like caramelised condensed milk, in wavy stripes all over the top of my pancake, under which nestled two generous scoops of vanilla ice cream flecked with dark vanilla pod specks.
All in all, our evening rated far more highly than our visit to the slightly disappointing Chez Gerard this time last year. It was also more pricy than any meal we’d ever had to fund ourselves, but worth it for the good food and interesting experience. An excellent way to celebrate a great nine years. 
