Always nicely dark inside, you fall over the furniture a lot until your eyes adjust, it also benefits from an excellent Argentinian wine list. At a time when one rather suspected South America was dumping their inferior wines on the UK, the wine list at Gaucho was and remains a taste of what’sreally available if you know where to look.
Starters, it has to be said, have never been the greatest thing on the Gaucho menu, even though they were doing ceviche long before it became briefly fashionable. The new menu has Argentine King Prawns, which for some reason conjured up visions of prawns in stetsons, and these come pan fried with black pudding, fresh orange and romesco sauce. There is an affinity between prawns and the black stuff, here the pudding is the softer, crumblier boudin style and not the kind of pudding beloved in the Midlands, and the acidity of the orange and the spike of the romesco sauce made up quite an interesting mouthful. You could call it fusion perhaps but it didn’t seem out of place in a restaurant devoted to steak.
Fernando, Gaucho’s grill chef, uses lots of super hard rock salt to season the meat on the upper side as it cooks because, as he explains, that kind of salt doesn’t immediately become absorbed and encourage moisture loss. It’s also important not to fiddle with the steak, not to poke and prod it about, only turn it over once when the meat is clearly coming away from the bars without sticking. He recommends 70% of the cook time is the first grill, then 30% more after turning it over. Doneness is a matter of experience, but again he recommends you don’t prod the meat more than you have to.
Most of the salt will fall off when the steak is turned, so don’t worry health freaks, while towards the end of the cooking, chimichurri sauce is painted on and a small bowl of it is also served on the plate The result is a an excellenly flavoured, well-seasoned steak with a happy crunch and superb fat. It was delicious, if anything can wean steak lovers off the expensive, and to my mind less interesting fillet, then this is definitely it.
If you havent yet graduated to grown up food, then there is also the new Gaucho Burger – a blend of all four cuts of beef with smoked bacon, Bermondsey Frier cheese, chipotle chutney, roasted onion mayonnaise, brioche bun and chips. A strident and unsubtle flavour bomb designed to deliver all the main basic taste groups that Americans and teenagers demand in one messy mouthful. If you like that sort of thing, then you’ll love this..
We finished with dessert of Salted Dulce De Leche and Macadamia Cheesecake with salted caramel sauce, which all rather stressed the salt bit and I’m not yet convinced by salted caramel, but the wine, a Torrontes Licoroso Parral de los Monjes, was excellent.
If you’re bored with standard steak, the tapa de ancho should give you more than enough reason to get down to Gaucho and try the new menu