No beef about Gaucho's steaks

16 April 2015

The restaurant reservation site, OpenTable.com, runs a chart of the 10 most-booked restaurants in London. Though it includes places like Le Café Anglais and Tate Modern, it is invariably dominated by multiple Gaucho restaurants, the group taking at least five of the top places.

Why? It's certainly not because the place is a bargain. For a chain, Gaucho is startlingly expensive, the final bill ending up pretty close to one from much more stylish, individual restaurants, such as the lavish new Italian in Broadgate, L'Anima.

So what's the appeal? Perhaps the answer is dismayingly simple. What a lot of people - OK, a lot of men - want when they go out to eat is a steak and nothing but a steak. Whatever they have to force down at home, out on the town they're going to hit the meat.

For a long time, satisfying that primal urge wasn't so easy. The big brand steakhouses were never any good - only Alan Partridge ever admired the infamous Berni Inns - and then wouldbe carnivores were further quelled by mad cow disease and the terrifying emergence of vCJD in humans.

But Gaucho is the answer to both these deterrents. It serves only Argentinian beef, reared on the pampas and shipped over chilled, never frozen. It's undeniably great stuff - and they cook it well, turned only once on the grill, salted only on one side.

Moreover, there's an ostentatious little bit of theatre acted out for you before you order. Uninvited, the waitress brings over a board adorned with different cuts of raw beef and waves it in your face. There's rump, sirloin, fillet and rib-eye, and for good measure, another called Churrasco de Cuadril, spiral cut and marinated, plus - slightly sickmakingly crossing species, you can't help feeling it should be on a different board - some Patagonian lamb.

As you contemplate these chunks of flesh, the waiter recites a helpful little text about fillet being the tenderest but rib-eye the most flavoursome, and that each steak is available in three sizes, from 225g to 400g.

And the steak does deliver. I had the smallest rib-eye - large enough for any appetite but that of a major predator - cooked medium, as advised, at £13. For this price, you just get the steak itself, on a plate, nothing else at all.

Sauces - béarnaise, peppercorn, tomato chumichurri or blue cheese - cost a further £2. I dimly requested the béarnaise, which had an over-pungent flavour, featuring unwelcome leaves of fresh tarragon, a herb that easily tips over into acridity - but no sauce was needed. The steak was so good it made most of what one eats as beef seem a paltry imitation of this, the real thing.

To go with it, a biggish plate of moreish-thin chips - hot, crisp, very salty and lightly scattered with thyme leaves - was loss-leader value at £2.50, there being enough for two. Add to this, say, a 50cl pot of the cheapest own-label Argentinian Malbec at £14.35, and two could eat really well for under £50.

But I doubt this ever happens. Gaucho is not for cheapskates. Everything about the way that the restaurants are organised militates against such economising.

The Gaucho group is a big business, in and out of public ownership in recent years: floated in 1999, taken private again in 2002, and bought out by its original owner, Zeev Godik, in 2005, for £23.5 million, before being sold on to private equity group Phoenix for £55 million. Late last year, yet another flotation, valuing the company at about £110 million, was briefly mooted but then withdrawn.

There are 11 restaurants in the chain, so, at that price, each one was valued at up to £10 million, which one analyst certainly thought too much, "for a brand with £49 average spend per head, a mixed track record and questionable scope for expansion" - not to mention that we're all feeling poorer by the day.

This year, two new Gauchos have opened, Gaucho O2 and Gaucho Tower Bridge. This last, tucked away behind the slumped cowl of City Hall, was pretty empty on a recent Saturday lunchtime - obviously the wrong time to go, although it's open seven days a week, noon to midnight.

The place is got up like a batty nightclub, with a black floor, black walls, chandeliers and bobbly glass everywhere. There are lots of circular booths for parties, and the loos carry on the same "big night out" feel, with orchids and candles. The whole place is dominated by genuine piebald cowhide all over the chairs and walls. It's hairy stuff.

All this flash felt a little desolate on a dull morning, despite the fine view of the bridge. A thuddy soundtrack, modulating after a while into jazzed up Satie and remixed Coldplay, didn't help. And, alas, the rest of the menu doesn't match up to the beef.

The ceviche sampler starter - we chose tuna, swordfish and scallops - was poor value at £17.50. Served on a glass tray divided into little compartments were a single slice of the fishes and a few diced scallop pieces, variously bedecked with a few salad leaves, bits of fennel, and in the case of the scallops, fierce chilli pepper.

If you have come to love good sashimi, you're unlikely ever to want to go back to ceviche - raw fish "cooked" in lime juice. With its acidity, fruitiness and salty edge, it tastes like an odd margarita. But in any case, this fish wasn't great anyway, the swordfish worryingly close to being off.

Another starter, chorizo sausage, (£7.50), had no resemblance to chorizo as ordinarily understood, instead being one large, densely meaty, cooked sausage, a little like a Montbeliard, baldly sitting on top of a large, nicely roasted romesco pepper. It wasn't a bad sausage, but as a starter was a brutal plateful.

Likewise, Patagonian sea bass (£19) came as a huge chunk of large-flaked pieces from a monster fish, aiming to pull its weight as a fishy steak, maybe - juicy and tasty enough but somehow, having come from the other side of the world, not the freshest fish ever. Grilled vegetables (£5.75) were a bit barbaric too: whole small aubergines and halved courgettes, fiercely barbecued.

Gaucho offers an extensive list of Argentinian wines, many of them surprisingly pricy. A glass of deep, dark Terraza Reserva Malbec at £9.35 was enjoyable enough but not worth that price. A good Cahors (from the only French wine appellation specialising in this grape) is softer.

Maybe Gaucho's hearty simplicity is true enough to Argentine cooking? But that doesn't make it seem any more appropriate to central London - though plenty of carnivores obviously disagree.

Gaucho - Tower Bridge
2 More London Riverside, SE1 2AP

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Alan Partridge

No beef about Gaucho's steaks

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