The Times
Chitra Ramaswamy ate “the most expensive steak I’ve ever ordered, a chateaubriand at £16 per 100g from a 12-14-year-old Rubia Gallega cow imported from Galicia at Spanish Butcher, the new Edinburgh branch of a Glasgow restaurant.
It was, she said, “sublime. The primordial Euro-steak of your pastoral, pre-Brexit, presolastalgic dreams.” Presolastalgic? Winner of the critics’ ‘word of the week’ award, meaning that blissful age in the past when nobody worried about climate change or air miles, so the idea of flying beef to a country with its own prime beef industry rang no alarm bells.
The meat was “as intensely flavoured as the Galician hills are perfumed, so very soft, making the kind of food memories that will torment me in all my future moments of sharp-toothed hunger.”
Bizarrely, though, everything else about the restaurant was “… the opposite of great”. Service slow, prawns chewy and under seasoned, garlic potatoes missing the garlic, romesco sauce that “tastes of very old nuts left at the bottom of a bowl in a 1970s pub”. “Go for the Galician beef. And throw every penny you can at it.”
Chitra Ramaswamy - 2024-06-23
