The last of the fillet.

Fillet up please

No ‘Friday night is steak night’ this weekend as I had my annual Christmas dinner with the cricket club. I play for the Chelsea Arts Club, a marvelous club founded by a truly eccentric and wonderful man named David Maddox. We are a pretty handy side and  consistently win a lot more games than we lose. We also hold the prestigious title of being the world ice-cricket champions.

Instead I planned to use the remaining fillets – sent to me from my new best friend in Dubai – to make up some single portion Beef Wellingtons. Come Sunday evening though I was feeling exhausted and lazy and sadly could not muster the energy to rush to M&S to pick up the filo pastry, a crucial ingredient.

So instead I griddle fried the remaning steaks and served with chips & curly kale together with a few spring onions. Not the mosy glamorous of Sunday lunches but still magnificent in taste. Tillie could not even magage half of hers and my appetite was not great either, so this week I’ll mostly be snacking on fillet & horseraddish sandwiches.

Things could be worse!

Sunday night is steak night

Two-pronged beef injection

Hello mum

Last Friday was a very special ‘Friday night is steak night’. Let me tell you why.

Having read my review of his restaurant, the owner of the Grand Grill in Dubai very kindly sent me 1.8-kilos of his finest South African Fillet steak. Matt smuggled back the vacuumed packed cow in his suitcase risking life & limb and a £5000 HM Revenue & Customs fine to deliver it.

Combined with this my mother was visiting from Cornwall and brought four very sizable sirloins with her, which she picked up from a Cornish butcher in Kingsley Village.

Fortunately for my waistline I had the help of several other family members in consuming the 3-kilos of prime beef that had fortuitously landed on my doorstep. Joining the meat feast was my brother Ross and his wife Sarah, my sister Sally and her fiance Ben. And of course my meat-mule Matt.

There are some healthy appetites in my family but none more so than Ben’s. He regularly consumes two or  three portions in a single sitting and still leaves room for dessert. The boy can eat.

So when preparing the meal I had to put some serious thought into how much to cook up. Too little and I risked irritating the likes of Ben. Too much and I’d be eating beef & horseradish sandwiches for the week ahead (which might not have been a bad thing).

I opted for all four of the sirloins and three of the fillets. All the steaks weighed about 300g so I was cooking about 1.8-kilos in total.

A tale of two calves.

I grilled the sirloin on full blast for about four minutes on each side. As I’ve said previously, unless you are cooking sirloin on a naked flame, the best alternative is the oven grill. A decent griddle pan can do the trick but don’t consider frying sirloin as you won’t release the fats and the flavour will suffer as a result.

The fillet was cooked in a heavyweight griddle pan for five minutes on either side. The cuts were very thick but the quality was so good that they cooked through quickly – so this was plenty of time to get them to rare.

I served up the beef with a green leaf salad, new potatoes and runner beans.

We also drank our way through most of this month’s wine club delivery which included several bottles of the scrumptious Chateau Mayne Guyon 2005.

All in all a very pleasant evening. Must do that again soon.

Happy customers

A safe bet on the Gigi’s.

Sadly last weekend was without steak. I enjoyed plenty of great quality wine and experienced some of Manchester’s finest curry, though beef was not on the menu. This week then I’m going to tell you about one of the greatest steak restaurants I’ve ever eaten in.

I lived and worked in northern Italy between the years of 2001 and 2005 in the picturesque town of Bassano Del Grappa. It’s a stunning place in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains. Like most Italian towns Bassano has its fair share of fantastic eateries. It’s a very wealthy part of the world and the town itself is quite pretentious, so many of the restaurants in the town centre are quite poncy. Venture a few miles out of town though and you can choose from any number of brilliant Agriturismo’s or Trattoria’s.

Eating out in rural Italy is cheap and the out-of-town places are particularly good value. You can have a three course meal with coffee, wine and all the Limoncello you can drink for less than twenty euros. During my time spent in Italy I probably ate in restaurants more than I did my own home.

Top of the list of places I frequented was Al Castellaro, or the Grappa Gun restaurant as most of us knew it. Al Castellaro is hidden away in the hills of San Eusebio in the outskirts of Bassano. The restaurant is hard to reach by car. So hard in fact that the owners purchased a couple of Land Rovers to ferry customers up the daunting dirt path that leads to the restaurant.

Gigi & his Grappa gun

The format at Al Castellaro is always the same. When you alight the 4×4 you’re greeted at the door by Louisa – the wife of the owner – who takes you to your table. Depending on how busy the place is you can usually choose from one of three dining areas. The main room is usually better for large groups or parties. The converted conservatory area is the cosiest and nicest looking. And if the place is heaving then you are sometimes relegated to the upstairs section which is not as pleasant.

Having seated you, Louisa then dictates the entire menu at some pace and in Veneto dialect. As we were usually entertaining our foreign friends or family, this process often took considerable time.

The menu is simple and like all great Italian restaurants changes with every season. First up is the ‘Prima’, which is normally a pasta dish of some sort. Bassano is famous for a pasta called Bigoli – basically a fat spaghetti – and the sauce of choice is typically duck which comes minced. I usually opted for this but I had one or two other favourites including a Cannelloni and a Gorgonzola based pasta bake.

I was always weary not to fill my belly with pasta however, preferring to save myself for the ‘Secondo’. For the main you can select from around ten different meat dishes. The menu is unashamedly biased towards carnivores and caters little for vegetarians.  And rightly so. There are three types of steak to choose from; a simple ‘beef-steak’ which is a fairly measly (but tasty) type of frying steak, the colossus Costata which is the Italian variation of the T-bone, or the Fillet which is the best on offer by far.

I always went for the Fillet but added the word ‘grandissimo’ before my order, which roughly translates as huge. Louisa always obliged and my Fillet usually weighed in at around 500-600 grams. The Fillet steak at Al Castellaro is to die for. It’s genuinely melt in the mouth stuff. It is sourced locally from a butcher in Veneto and is farmed in Italy. The Fillet at Al Castellaro sets the benchmark for Fillet steak. I’ve eaten some great Fillet steak around the world but nothing has yet to compare with the Fillet served at Al Castellaro.

After the main course the ‘Nona’ arrives at the table to take the desert and coffee orders. And then the fun begins.

The name ‘Grappa Gun’ is given due to the antics of the charismatic owner Gigi, whose role in running Al Castellaro is restricted to entertaining the guests. At around 9PM Gigi starts patrolling the premises armed with his makeshift Grappa Gun, which is basically a pump action spray-can filled with Bassano’s finest Grappa.

Nobody is safe from the wrath of Gigi and unless you put forward a serious case as to why you can’t get involved you will undoubtedly fall victim. The best bet is to cover yourself from the chin down with your napkin and open your mouth as wide as possible. After years of practice Gigi has a pretty good aim and most of what he offloads ends up in the intended target. That said I rarely left Al Castellaro without stinking of Grappa and feeling quite sticky.

After his hunt, Gigi can usually be found at the communal fireside table in the middle of the restaurant. Here he generously tops up his patrons glasses and offers his homemade anchovy-stuffed chili peppers, which are delicious. On occasion he also shows off his Pranotherapy skills, whereby he attempts to send his willing subjects into a trance. I witnessed one or two people enter a trance, but I think this was down to excessive Grappa consumption rather than Gigi’s mystic powers.

The night typically ends with a bumpy ride back down to base camp and long walk home. And the next morning is usually a little painful.

Verdict: Al Castellaro combines great food with an amazing atmosphere. Quite simply one of the great restaurants of this world.

Régal de viande

L'Auberge Provencale

Most of last week was spent in Cannes with my buddy and colleague Will, where we were attending Mipcom. Hours of meetings are usually followed by hours of socialising at one or other of the overpriced La Croisette hotel bars. Beforehand though we’ll typically eat at any one of the many local eateries.

The majority of French restaurants in Cannes have very similar menus comprising a reasonable selection of local dishes, but there is only one thing I’ll ever order. This year alone I’ve eaten seven or eight meals in Cannes and every time I’ve opted for the fillet of beef. Last week we ate at the L’Auberge Provencale, the L’Assiete Provencale and one other restaurant on Rue St.-Antoine in the old town whose name I forget.

L'Assiete provencale

Like most tourist traps the food in Cannes is rarely worth what you pay for it. The food is almost always overpriced but you’ll usually be guaranteed a decent meal made up of good local produce and fresh seasonal ingredients. Each place usually has a slightly different way of preparing the meat and serving it. The L’Auberge seared the meat until it blackened before gently cooking the inside through. The L’Assiete presented the beef Au jus.

The other place probably served the best quality meat but the service riled me to the point that I lost interest in being there. Not only was my food served 20 minutes after my eating companions but when it arrived it was not what I ordered. 20 minutes passed until my food eventually arrived. Needless to say I will not be going there again.

Rue St.-Antoine

Quantity wise I was happy enough at each of the restaurants. Each beef serving was between 250-350 grams meaning over the course of the three days I consumed almost 1 kilo of fillet steak.

I wondered if this was at all healthy and did a little research online to explore average beef consumption around the world. I discovered that the world’s largest beef consumers are the Argentinians who eat on average 155 pounds of beef a year (source: NY Times). That equates to 70 kilos per year, which equals 200 grams per day, every day!

Bearing in mind that this is an average for the population and there will be some fatties no doubt nailing 3 or 4 times that amount, I think it’s fair to say that my biannual French Riviera meat feast is perfectly acceptable and will do no long-term harm to my health whatsoever.

It’s a shame the same does not apply to the bank balance.

Verdict: Cannes is not a place to go if you are suffering from the current credit crisis.