Goodman, Mayfair

Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way before we go any further. Goodman, although it pains me to my very soul to say it, is better than Hawksmoor. A greater variety of steaks, their own ageing room and a couple of top-end Josper oven grills in the kitchen all combine to produce a dining experience which is as close to The Real Deal as it's possible to get in London, perhaps Europe. And not only are their steaks of sublime and unsurpassed quality, their staff knowledgeable and enthusiastic and the infrastructure solid, but they do all this in the centre of Mayfair at a price which even without any special offers or discounts can genuinely be described as a bargain.

Any restaurant - even any good restaurant - has some serious competition in this area of town. I started my evening, given that as per usual I'd arrived far too early for my reservation, in the Polo Bar, 2 minutes walk away on Conduit Street, and on the short hop to Goodman I passed Sketch, Wild Honey, Patterson's and Hibiscus, all big-name restaurants. But Goodman is not a Michelin-chasing temple of haute cuisine and doesn't pretend to be. In the fine US tradition, it is an accessible and informal space, looking at first glance an awful lot like a branch of All Bar One - masculine and rowdy and dark. There are no tablecloths here, no thick carpets and no cognac trolleys. It's all about the food, and the food is all about the steak.



David Strauss, restaurant manager and Keeper Of The Holy Ageing Cupboard, suggested a selection of 3 quite different steaks (all from master butcher Jack O'Shea) in order that we appreciate the differences between the producers and cuts. After very little deliberation, we agreed. What arrived was a large plate groaning with meat, sliced very handily into bitesize strips, Luger's style. My least favourite (brace yourselves) was the UK grass-fed sirloin, which was rather watery on the tongue and with not enough juicy fat, although perhaps I just got a particularly lean example. Better was the Irish Black Angus ribeye, with a deeper, richer flavour and some lovely bits of crispy charred fat. But the clear winner, the gold standard of beef, the king of cows, was a USDA Prime New York Strip steak (better known over here a porterhouse). This was extraordinarily good - a rich, minerally flavour combined with a startlingly tender texture which dissolved in the mouth. So not only is Hawksmoor no longer my favourite steakhouse, but I have the further ignominy of realising my favourite steak is grain-fed and flown in from the US. It's just not fair.


The sauces which accompanied the steaks were similarly accomplished. Black pepper was pleasingly fiery, the béarnaise was rich and light, the red wine and veal stock jus silky and moreish. Only the chips were a let-down, cooked well but in old or inferior oil and not very pleasant unfortunately. Creamed spinach was pleasant enough though.

I don't think I've ever leapt out of my seat faster than when David suggested a tour of the kitchen. Downstairs at Goodman a half dozen or so chefs toil near the heat of two mean-looking Josper grills which, Dave was eager to point out, are fired only using charcoal and not gas or electricity. Nearby was the ageing room, whose shelves were stacked with blackened chunks of seriously old meat. As blogger, author and fellow steakhouse groupie Simon Majumdar said, "That meat room is where I want to move when I leave this flat". Imagine being a Beatles fan in a room of original signed copies of all their albums, or a comic book enthusiast allowed to roam around a library of Superman No.1s. It was brilliant.





After all that excitement, and all that steak (some of which they kindly wrapped up in foil for me to take home, there was so much of it), all that was left was the bill. Bear in mind we'd had three glasses of excellent full-bodied Argentinean Malbec, a glass of Jurançon to finish, chips, spinach, sides, bread and more top-quality steak than we could even finish, when I tell you that the final bill came to around £50 each. That, while not being a cheap dinner, is stunning value for money when you consider the amount of food we'd eaten and the quality of the produce.

As you can probably tell, I thoroughly enjoyed myself at Goodman. I will continue to be a loyal regular at Hawksmoor, because after all it's still a smashing steakhouse and it's a lot handier for me in terms of location. Also - and Goodman are possibly missing a trick here - they have a great cocktail menu. But in terms of technique, service and yes, even value, Goodman currently have the edge over anywhere else in town.

9/10

The Hawksmoor Burger

It's really felt like Spring in London the last couple of days. Mornings have been clear and bright, the daytime air is dry and noticeably warmer than before, and it's even been light on my journey home in the evenings. And with the change in the weather the restaurants in the capital - well, the good ones - will start taking advantage of seasonal ingredients and revamp their menus, so it's out with parsnips and hotpots and game, and in with asparagus, spring lamb and lemon sole. Which is all very well for French restaurants, gastropubs and bistros, but how do you keep your menu fresh and relevant if you're a steakhouse and essentially serve the same premium meat and chips all year round? Top-end beef purveyors Hawksmoor have answered that in style by knuckling down and creating the best burger in London.

I realise that's quite a claim to make. After all, the marketplace for what is cringingly known as the "gourmet burger" has exploded in the last couple of years, starting with the Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Hamburger Union and the like, and more recently going all top-end with Haché and Byron. And yet, while most of these places serve perfectly serviceable food (Haché in particular is worth checking out), nowhere has quite the obsession with quality and sourcing as the boys in Hawksmoor. They have, I'm reliably informed, been eating more burgers than are good for them in the last few months, honing and perfecting the recipe and paying detailed attention to every element, from the lightly-toasted brioche bap to the mixture of unusual cuts of meat from the Ginger Pig's superb longhorn cattle. The end result is worth every penny of its hefty £15 price tag.


Served with their famous triple-cooked chips, the Hawksmoor burger comes with a couple of slices of delicately sweet pickle, a slice of fresh red onion, a slice of meaty beef tomato, some crispy lettuce doused in a whole grain mustard mayonnaise, and surrounded in billowy pads of sweet (but not too sweet) toasted brioche buns. But despite these excellently judged accompaniments, the real star is the meat - juicy and complex, with an almost metallic flavour and satisfying, gelatinous bite. The beef from the Ginger Pig has, in my own humble opinion, a flavour rich and earthy enough to challenge anything USDA-branded from across the pond, and is the single most important factor that lifts this burger above all the competition. It is also, I would imagine, the reason why it's more expensive than all the competition too, but hey, you get what you pay for. Also, and I realise it's early days, but I would have liked the option to customise my burger slightly. In the interests of research, and despite the suspicious glances of the serving staff, I removed the vegetables from the bun and ate part of the burger au naturel - just the bread, meat and cheese. It was wonderful.

This was already my favourite restaurant in this part of town, and now they just happen to be serving up the best burger money can buy is not about to change that. Hawksmoor has long been a perfect example of how passion, technical skill and an almost dangerous obsession with quality and providence can create stunning results. The fact that they are beginning to apply that energy to the creation of new dishes is a most exciting trend. I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

Cheese and Biscuits Restaurant of the Year 2008 - Tayyab's, Whitechapel

It is perhaps a sign of these credit-crunchy times that, for me at least, 2008 was not quite as chock-full of Michelin starred, multi-course blowouts as 2007. And when I did occasionally push the boat out, results were mixed to say the least. Under the "disappointing and expensive" category are Texture, Quo Vadis, St John, Le Bouchon Breton and Andaman, all of which managed to present a bill of at least £70 a head and serve food which although not exactly bad came far short of being value for money. Only one fine dining restaurant - The Square, in Mayfair - do I consider worthy of the stratospheric prices they charge, and I hope to goodness that they steer a course through the tricky economic waters of 2009 as I intend to visit again as soon as my bank balance allows it. As for the others, well, we may be about to see a kind of culinary Darwinism at work. I would keep a close eye on some of those names above and see how many are here in twelve months time.

But I am not going to make The Square my Restaurant of the Year. Yes, it's served three of the best meals I've ever eaten, with dishes so perfectly judged in terms of presentation and taste that they can scarcely be bettered in the country, but at £100 a head that's exactly what you'd expect. Likewise Hawksmoor, which dishes out beautifully cooked steaks and wonderful cocktails and has become almost a second home for me in the last few months, but again you would damn well hope so too at £30 a plate, plus extra for chips. The Square and Hawksmoor have hit just the right point on the value for money graph and I'm quite happy for them, but perhaps a truly great restaurant needs something more - not just an ability to meet expectations but smash them into a billion pieces, and not just once or occasionally but again and again and again. And with that in mind, there could only ever really be one winner.

I have in the past moaned about the queues at Tayyab's, even going so far as to suggest an alternative to the daily scrum on Fieldgate Street. The crowds start congregating around 6pm, and by 7:30 or so they snake around the inside of the restaurant, past the sweet counter and back again and sometimes even out into the street, hundreds strong, day after day. And if you have to ask what restaurant in the world can possibly deserve this kind of fanatical devotion, then you haven't eaten there. Juicy, spicy seekh kebabs; sizzling hot platters of bright red lamb chops coated in addictive tandoori spicing that stain your hands for hours afterwards; masala fish which manages to be crispy on the outside and fluffy and moist inside, the robust spicing never overpowering the tilapia meat itself; and dry meat - oh, the dry meat. A heavenly concoction of spices and stock, reduced for so long it's become almost a concentrated meat purée, and yet containing chunks of miraculously tender lamb, the Tayyab's dry meat is a monumental achievement. It is also, as far as I am aware, unique to this restaurant.

One of Tayyabs' biggest fans, and this is saying something for a restaurant whose Facebook 'Appreciation Group' has over 1,000 members, is Gavin Baxter, who has been a regular since far before it became trendy amongst bandwagon-jumping foodies such as myself. Along with other members of the Opinionated About Forums he was an early advocate of the then still relatively unknown Pakistani grill house and was there for the ride as it expanded from a tiny canteen in an old newsagents to the former pub next door and subsequent fame and glory. Gavin signs off his OA forum posts with a quote from Benjamin Franklin on beer; it also struck me as an appropriate final word on my 2008 Restaurant of the Year, with one small alteration:

"Tayyab's is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"

Looking forward to 2009, there are no prizes of any kind for guessing what I'm expecting this year's highlight to be. I'm afraid there are no available spaces for the trip to El Bulli in September, but rest assured I will write it all up in as much detail as circumstances allow, and I'll be thinking of everyone who didn't win the email lottery as I tuck into my spherical olives. I also promise to not be too smug and keep going on about it.

So, final "thank you"s to Simon Majumdar for mentioning me in the Times Online, to Niamh of Eat Like A Girl and Trusted Places, Helen of FoodStories, Lizzie of Hollow Legs, Charles and Joel of Tipped, Andy Hayler, Silverbrow and of course to everyone else following Cheese and Biscuits in such frankly baffling numbers. I hope you find enough here to entertain you in the year ahead. Cheers, and have a Melón con jamón on me: