I’ve been searching for a more pretentious manner in which to tell waiters how I like my steak cooked. I don’t often order steak in restaurants because, on the whole, they don’t do it very well. Steak needs close, scrupulous attention for five whole minutes at least, and most chefs won’t stretch to that.

Occasionally, however, I get gripped by a wish to display my inherent manliness: I am, after all, male, and we are expected to prefer eating steak to anything else. Did you know, by the way, that March 14 has been designated International Steak and Blow Job Day? It has. There is a website for it. It’s meant to be a day when heterosexual men get stuff that they really like, rather than the officially sanctioned Father’s Day, which is just embarrassing for everybody.

Anyway, I digress. Eating steak makes me feel more of a man than eating a plate of, say, tofu or Quorn, and girls like it when you eat a great hunk of rib-eye. I remember, many years ago, taking a girl out for dinner and trying to impress her with my sophistication and sensitivity by not ordering steak. She looked at my plate and said: “Dover sole? You poof.” Hell of a nice girl, really.

So, these days, I attempt to show my sophistication by trying to bamboozle the waiter about how I want it done. Years ago, when I was a kid, I would say “well done”. This was what I was used to, after all: pre-1980, all meat was grey in colour. But I soon realised this was terribly de trop, and started saying “medium”. Later still, I progressed to “rare”. Recently, I have been saying, with an airy wave of the hand, “à point”. I don’t know what “à point” means, but, crucially, nor do most waiters. Anyway, it almost never makes any difference to how the steak is cooked.

Where does one find the best steak in England? It used to be said that it was one of the few things we do well — and certainly better than the French, who, given a chance, will serve you leg of horse or, worse, onglet, which tastes like the sort of thing you might end up with if you cooked Charles Clarke’s shinbone. Now, though, we’re good at everything — along with New York and maybe San Francisco, London has the most diverse and technically accomplished restaurants in the world. Is there any room left for steak?

The 450g rump steak has a bad reputation, these days. We all remember those Aberdeen Steak Houses, with their horrible red banquettes, the dismal silence of the torpid dining room enlivened only by the gentle rasping and popping of the farts of middle-aged businessmen from Dudley. Most of them have gone, and in their place we have Chez Gérard, a chain as imbued with the culinary ethos of the 1980s as was the Aberdeen Angus Steak House with the ethos of the 1970s. There was a time — round about 1987 — when Chez Gérard epitomised that go-gettin’, streamlined, incalculably macho Thatcherite philosophy. But now it feels marooned and lost, the great globs of béarnaise sauce and indiscriminately cooked slabs of meat a testament to a time when lunch was for wimps. There is nothing terribly wrong with Chez Gérard’s steaks, and the price (from £10 for a bit of onglet) is, in true Thatcherite style, competitive. But flavour? Depth? Nah.

We have new chains for that. I suspect that an Argie steak house wouldn’t have fared very well in the 1980s, but hell, forgive and forget. The Gaucho Grill — seven outlets in London, one in Manchester — serves much better food than restaurants of its size should do. You get a chance to view the meat before you eat it, which is a cheering sign. The lomito de cuadril (chateaubriand, by my reckoning) can be very good indeed, and at £38 for two people, it is not excessive. Plus, you can have a side order of fried yucca with it.

Right at the top of the market are Smiths of Smithfield, John Torode’s huge and accomplished establishment, and Wiltons, in St James’s, which is, of course, more expensive, but also a lot better. When I told the waiter at Wiltons I wanted my fillet steak “à point”, he nodded knowingly. Respect to the man. In a sense, the steak (£25) at Wiltons was the least impressive item I tried — the dressed crab was extraordinarily good — but it was crunchy on the outside and tenderly pink in the middle. And it tasted of proper, grass-grazed cow, rather than the barley-fed dross that is too often its replacement.

Outside London, you could try Antony Worrall Thompson’s The Angel Coaching Inn, in Heytesbury, Wiltshire. I ought to declare an interest — my mate Paul is the chef. But you would be hard pressed to find a restaurant serving better-sourced meat (from the nearby Pensworth Farm and Castle Brae, in Scotland), nor better cooked, nor at a more amenable price. The popeseye — my favourite cut, from the top of the rump — is £16.95. You can have rib-eye for a quid less.

But the truth is, you can’t beat cooking a steak at home. You can stand by the cooker, staring at it lovingly, flipping it over every 60 seconds, six minutes to salivate longingly. You need a decent butcher, of course — mine is William Rose, of Lordship Lane, in southeast London. You need to look for meat that is “Scottish”, meaning that it has been reared from birth in Scotland, rather than “Scotch”, which means it once knew some people who went on holiday to Oban. Don’t worry if the meat is dark (just make sure it isn’t barley-fed: ask the butcher), but worry a little if it is too livid and fiery a red.

Make sure it has been hanging about for a bit — my butchers hang the meat for roughly 21 days, but another week in your fridge (wrapped in paper, not plastic) will improve things further — then cook it. Let the meat acclimatise to room temperature, heat a frying pan with a little oil to a high temperature, then bung in the steaks.



I like mine seared almost to blackness on the outside (not to “seal in the juices”, because that doesn’t happen — that sizzling sound you can hear is the juices escaping — but because I like the flavour of seared meat) and pink inside. Turn down the heat or even switch it off; you can bung the steak in a heated oven to finish it off once it has been flipped. Serve with a tomato and red onion salad with freshly ground black pepper, drizzled in olive oil, along with sautéed potatoes and a mound of freshly grated horseradish. Do all this, and you will have a steak that surpasses even what you might find at Wiltons.

Meanwhile, for men everywhere, roll on March 14.

WHERE TO GO FOR A STEAK OUT

William Rose Butchers,
126 Lordship Lane, SE22; 020 8693 9191

Wiltons,
55 Jermyn Street, SW1; 020 7629 9955, www.wiltons.co.uk

The Angel Coaching Inn,
High Street, Heytesbury, Warminster, Wiltshire; 01985 840330, www.theangelheytesbury.co.uk

Smiths of Smithfield;
020 7251 7950, www.smithsofsmithfield.co.uk

Gaucho Grill;
www.gaucho-grill.com

Chez Gérard;
020 7881 8870, www.santeonline.co.uk

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