Restaurant review: Steak, Edinburgh

Y ou wait years for a new steak restaurant to come along, then all of sudden, in the most desolate conditions in which to open a new restaurant, two appear in Edinburgh within months of each other. So, to add to the recent launch of the impressive gourmet steak restaurant Kyloe at The Rutland, we now have Steak, the latest offering from 12 Picardy Place, the operation formerly known as Hawke & Hunter and, way back when, as The Hallion.

You get into Steak through the door to 14 Picardy Place, and the place immediately makes an impression. I was here for a dinner in November when the area was used for black-tie bashes, and in the meantime it’s been completely remodelled. After you go down a small, neat corridor you open out into what was an enormous windowless conference room but which has now been turned into a breathtakingly inviting space.

The owners wrestled with the fact that their Georgian building’s listed status means they can’t make major structural changes. Their novel solution was to engage a theatre set designer, who took the edges off a cavernous room that could so easily produce a sterile, unwelcoming vista on those nights when the place isn’t full, by suspending large beams from the ceiling by thick ropes, as well as breaking up the room with a ring of Ikea-style backless bookshelves. Together with sotto voce lighting, endless candles, big antique mirrors and a dusky-green paint job, they have succeeded in creating a surprisingly intimate and classy environment.

If the Picardy Place team have judged the interior design of their 120-cover restaurant perfectly, what of the food? The responsibility for this rests with Jason Wright, the man in charge of the kitchen and who was Roy Brett’s right-hand man at both Dakota and Ondine. In this town you don’t get a more copper-bottomed endorsement than that.

His menu is simple and constructed, as you’d expect, around the steaks. You can choose from three types (Aberdeen Angus, Black Isle and on the bone) and five different cuts (sirloin, fillet, rump, rib eye and T-bone). A waiter brings a slab with each of the cuts on it and gives you a cursory explanation of how they vary. This was OK as far as it went, but for a specialist restaurant there could have been more information and there was a definite sense of lessons learnt by rote. Diana is a farmer’s daughter and was surprised by the choice of limousin cows, the Skoda of the bovine world, for the ‘on the bone’ section, but we couldn’t get any real sense as to why that choice was made.

It would also have been easy, for instance, to quickly explain how it’s the fat that gives steaks their taste, what marbling is, and how long the beef is hung for (and why). I would also have liked to have seen some guide to the provenance of the meat and perhaps the inclusion of a cheaper cut or two (the skirt or a feather steak would work well) somewhere on the menu. The back of the menu was blank, and a traditional illustration of where all the cuts come from on a cow, plus some detail of where the steaks come from, would have informed diners.

Still, there was much of interest on the menu, not least a ‘head to hoof’ £50 tasting menu that included crispy beef tongue salad, braised cheek steamed puddings, steak tartare, cote du boeuf with dripping chips and bone marrow, milk sorbet and suet toffee pudding with salted beef caramel and clotted cream. It took all of my admittedly feeble willpower to resist the siren call of that line-up.

Instead I started with the pork cheek and shallot terrine, which had a squidgy, unctuous texture but which was packed with a surprisingly deep, resonant flavour. Diana ordered what was described as a ‘crispy fried duck egg with toasted brioche soldiers, wild mushrooms and sage brown butter’ and instead received a Scotch egg made using a duck’s egg, which was still runny. Fortunately she likes Scotch eggs, and this was a particularly good example, but be warned.

For our main courses, Diana had a rare sirloin on the bone with a slick béarnaise sauce and I had a rare Black Isle rib eye with confusingly non-cheesy stilton hollandaise. The steaks are priced at £6-10 per 100g, with the recommendation you eat a 250g steak, which is just about perfect. Both our steaks were beautifully cooked, and while mine resounded with rich meatiness (the Black Isle has a deeper flavour than the Aberdeen Angus), Diana was resolutely sniffy about the inclusion of limousin beef.

We rounded off with a run-of-the-mill pear and frangipani tart and a superbly tart cowpie-sized citrus meringue pie, and as we did so we went back through our evening. There is an enormous amount to recommend Steak, and they’re clearly thinking hard about promotion. There’s BYOB (£5 corkage) on a Wednesday, a £12.50 steak ’n’ smoothie offer on Thursdays, a ‘late birds’ menu on Friday and Saturday nights (when the place is open till 2am), and diners last Sunday got a free meal when Scotland scored the first try against France. There’s also an unbookable bench table for walk-ups, where you may find yourself sitting cheek by jowl with Joe Stranger.

As well as the things mentioned above, there are a couple of other elements that need fine-tuning. The wine list is superb and well priced, but they ran out of their best by-the-glass wine, and the glass my second choice came in was so filthy I had to send it back. The speed of service was on Mediterranean time although – with the exception of one extremely grumpy fluorescent-haired waitress – charming and helpful. It’s also worth noting that the best response to a particularly noisy bunch of blokes isn’t to turn up the volume on the piped jazz.

Steak also indulges in my pet hate of charging for side dishes (our French fries were poor, especially compared to the triple-cooked chips in beef dripping), particularly when those side servings are on the small side and likely to bring the bill for a three-course meal for two with wine and service to well over £100.

Ultimately, though, these are teething problems. Steak has the fundamentals – a good chef and a fantastic environment – absolutely right, which is why it is destined to be a huge success.

Steak

12 Picardy Place, Edinburgh (0131-557 0952, www.steakedinburgh.com)

Bill please

Starters £6-£18 Salads £5 Main courses £10-£25 Steaks £15-£25 Puddings £6 Tasting menu £50 Rating

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