Sophie steaks her Fulham claim

This review was published in March 2002

Fulham is a funny place. It changes but somehow always stays the same. Take the crossroads near the cinema that I, and many others of my generation, refer to as 'the Beach'. Almost everything about the area has evolved. For a start, the cinema is no longer an ABC, but then it hasn't been for a decade or two.

And there used to be a restaurant called Parsons, which had been there since about 1970 and was a Browns clone with cream walls, mirrors, potted palms and bentwood chairs, before an incarnation as an All Bar One. It's now Sophie's Steakhouse.

And yet for all this change, Fulham man and his moll, Hooray Henry and his Henrietta, are the same as always. This is still the sort of territory where young women sport the kind of vaguely bouffed hair that hints at Alice bands, and men think that a covert coat with a velvet collar is the very apotheosis of suave lady-killing cool.

What makes Sophie and her Steakhouse so wonderful is not that she hangs her meat for 28 years, sorry, days, and that she seems monstrously committed to a sort of carnivorous bill of rights, a meat-eaters' charter, a commitment amply demonstrated in the buttery soft, well-flavoured lump of sirloin that is best ordered blue. It is rather that her eponymous eaterie is the Rosetta Stone that decodes the mores of the Sloane Ranger in his/her 20th-anniversary year.

Sophie's Steakhouse has that sort of quasi-industrial look of exposed brickwork, metal ducting, railway-style luggage racks and bare lightbulbs that is shorthand in London restaurants for 'honesty' and 'heartiness'. Add to that the sort of well-made, well-fitting wood-and-plate-glass frontage you might see in your local Pitcher & Piano, wooden-topped tables, a busy holding bar (there is a no-bookings policy), and a menu of simple, largely comforting food, and you have a packed restaurant on the Fulham Road.

Often when someone tells you that a restaurant is unpretentious they mean the opposite: all rustic this and regional that. Sophie's Steakhouse is genuinely unpretentious. It is one of the few places I know that makes a good Caesar salad using powdered parmesan rather than shavings. Another example of this showing of two fingers to the gastronomic conventions of our age is the gleeful way in which the menu trumpets the fact that salad can be ordered with blue cheese or Thousand Island dressing. It is all so gloriously early Eighties that I can almost hear the Billy Joel pumping out of a convertible Golf GTi.

So, even though I ordered the Caesar salad as a starter, I just had to have an iceberg wedge with blue cheese dressing to satisfy the atavistic urge to taste the Seventies and Eighties once again. Had I spotted the 'thick' milkshakes that are offered at the bottom of the menu I probably would have ordered one of those, too.

The only disappointment in an evening of pleasantly undemanding food was a strawberry cheesecake, which was just that little bit too characterless for my liking. But this is a small cavil about a place that seems to give the good burghers of Fulham what they want in large helpings.

We were served by a woman whom we correctly surmised was Sophie herself. As my Egyptologist friend commented, 'If I were Sophie, I would not let any other members of my staff look that good in red leather jeans.'

Although billed as a steakhouse, the term is interpreted in a most catholic way. There are three beef steaks: 10oz ribeye, 8oz fillet, and 10oz sirloin; one 9oz lamb steak; one 8oz swordfish steak; a steak sandwich; and then such dishes as grilled Portobello mushroom sandwich, the ubiquitous grilled goat's cheese salad or grilled lobster. In fact, perhaps Sophie's Grill might have been a more accurate name - unless, of course, you eat the beer-battered haddock and chips. Perhaps she might think of Sophie's Fish Fry as her next venture?

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