Butcher & Grill

Sunday T-bone

I finally got a booking at the Butcher & Grill in Battersea. This place is a carnivors paradise. The venue combines a fantastic butcher & grocers – full of organic produce sourced from various British farms – with a family friendly restaurant & bar. It’s located on Parkgarte Road in Battersea, but they also have a place in Wimbledon Village.

Tillie organised the lunch with the Airlock boys & wives. Sadly (for them) two of the eight people eating were vegetarians. The Butcher & Grill is certainly not a place you’d want to visit if you had an aversion to meat. To access the restaurant you need to walk through the butcher/abattoir and the walls are adorned with images of carcasses and other unfortunate animals.

The menu is not exclusively meat, but there’s not too much on offer for herbivores. A good thing in my books.

Talking of books the place also has a reasonable collection of meat related cook books to purchase. I spotted the cleverly named Beef by John Torode, which I couldn’t resist. Frequent readers will know that when it comes to cooking steak at home I am fairly unadventurous. I’m hopoing to take a leaf out of Mr. Torode’s book and cook up something a little more interesting over the coming weeks.

As for the quality of meat at the B&G I couldn’t fault it. I opted for the 500g T-bone, which comes from the Highfields Farm in East Sussex. Their herds come from pure-bred Sussex stock, with the use of a continental cross bull solely for prime beef production. Whatever they’re doing to the cows is obviously working as they tasted lovely.

The B&G is a very child friendly venue – which helps when you have a hungry 6-month baby in the party. Freddie was mainly well behaved (read asleep) but when it came to feeding time he made himself be known. For some reason he’s developed a tendency of only drinking milk when he is lying on his back, which makes feeding him in public an interesting and somewhat amusing experience.

Table for one please

Friday night is steak night.

Macken Bros.

Friday night in the Mair household is otherwise known as ‘Friday night is steak night’. Sadly my wife does not let me eat beef every night of the week. But come Friday I am always guarateed a decent meal – and I never waste the opportunity.

My local butcher is called Macken Brothers – and unless I’ve remembered to defrost something from the freezer or have visited another of my favourite butchers, I usually end up picking up my meat from them. Macken Brothers is a very good local butcher and they’ve been my saviour on many an occasion. My only gripe are the long queues and slightly inflated prices. But that’s an occupational hazard of buying your groceries from Turnham Green Terrace.

Tonight is a steak night. The ingredients were purchased from Macken this morning by Tillie before she departed to Liverpool for the weekend, leaving me home alone with Freddie, our 3 month old son. Freddie is not yet old enough to enjoy ‘Friday night is steak night’ with his daddy. Currently he prefers the milk of cows rather than the cows themselves. All that will change soon though.

Sirloin and snap peas

This evening I cooked 400g of Macken’s finest sirloin. Unfortunately they came as 2 x 200g pieces rather than one larger piece of beef. I much prefer cooking sirloin in thick cuts as you can grill it for some time – releasing loads of flavour from the fat – but without cooking the meat through. When sirloin is cooked in smaller portions it can only stand a couple of minutes on either side before cooking through, which is not enough time for the fat to release much flavour at all. If you’re buying good quality beef however, the flavour of the meat itself will usually be sufficient enough.

I cooked the steaks on my griddle pan and piled a packet of snap peas on top of them. No more than two minutes on either side were enough to cook the beef to how I like it. I blob of Dijon and a side salad with an Olive Oil & Balsamic dressing to accompany. The perfect ‘Friday night is steak night’.

To accompany the meal I cracked open a bottle of Chateau Macquin 2005, which I recently bought from the Sunday Times Wine Club. The list price for this wine is £11.99 a bottle, however if you make your purchase as a part of a club member offer and use voucher codes available from a site such as My Voucher Codes, you can pick it up for closer to £6 a bottle. An absolute bargain.

Verdict: You wouldn’t ask the wife to buy a pair of your shoes and you shouldn’t ask her to buy the steak either.