UNITED KINGDOM-THE GOODMAN.
If I were to ask you to name the All-American foodstuff, I’m betting I know what you’d answer. Yes, there will be some votes for Marshmallow Fluff; and lobbying for the corn dog. But when you come right down to it, there’s only one answer, and that answer is steak. Certainly, the esteemed editor of this column thinks so, which is why he sent me off to Goodman, a new, Russian-owned, American-style steakhouse in the heart of Mayfair. She’s American, he thought; she’ll know about steak. She’s just the woman to tell our readers whether a Russian-owned, American-style steakhouse might be worth its salt.
There is, however, an irony inherent in this assumption. I am, indeed, a Yankee girl, brought up in a city which prides itself on having some of the finest steakhouses in the land. In New York, Peter Luger in Brooklyn and the Old Homestead in the Meatpacking District have been destination restaurants to beef-buffs for a combined total of well over 200 years, which is not bad going for a still youthful nation. I’ve been to both, though not for a while, and frankly I’ve little inclination to go back, despite New York restaurant critics’ paeans to these pleasure palaces of blood and butter. Why? The answer is just one word. Corn. Corn is the reason that this American will have no truck with American steak.
Nearly all American beef cattle is fed on corn. "Corn-fed", or "grain-fed", is synonymous in the United States with the way things ought to be. Rich. Luxurious.
Cows, you see, would be happy just with grass – poor cows! What do they know? A cow has to eat a lot of grass, a lot of grass for a long time, before it gets hefty enough to go to the slaughterhouse and be turned into a tasty steak. Feed the same animal grain, however, and it will fatten up in a trice. What’s not to like?
Plenty. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World, has a simple analogy. You’d get fat quick too, he says, if all you ate was Snickers bars, but just how healthy would you be? You may imagine. I won’t go into detail as to exactly the kinds of digestive havoc a grain diet can wreak on an animal designed to eat something else entirely – I don’t want to spoil your dinner, or breakfast, or whatever – but I can promise you, it’s not a pretty story.
For those of you less concerned with animal welfare and more about what your meal tastes like, you’re still in for a nasty shock. I won’t eat steak in America not simply because I don’t like the way American beef cattle are treated; I won’t eat steak in America because it tastes of nothing at all. Sure, the meat’s tender; in a place like Peter Luger, you hardly need a knife. But grain-fed meat is bland and cottony. All the blood and butter in the world doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.
So I was not especially well disposed to Goodman, which, as I think I may have mentioned, is a Russian-owned, American-style steakhouse in Mayfair.
Not Russian-owned in the way that Chelsea are Russian-owned; I mean, seriously Russian-owned: if you want to visit the other branches, you actually have to go to Russia. Russian emulation of all things Western still suffers from an Ian Fleming hangover ("So! You think you know about steak, Mr Bond?") and, when I strolled in and saw the wood-panelled, pseudo-speakeasy decor, my heart sank just a tiny bit, and not only because I was all too well aware that I was just across the street from Hibiscus, one of my favourite places.
There were gleaming brass rails and serried ranks of black-and-white snaps of the Big Apple in the Jazz Age: it’s Goodman as in Benny, but if memory serves, the King of Swing’s legend survives thanks to musical rather than culinary prowess.
You’ve got to start with a cocktail in a place like this – I bet that’s what Benny would do. My guest, Neel, asked for a martini, very dry; a Gibson, I said, because I like to feel like Cary Grant when I’m drinking cocktails, and also to see if the bartender knows what I mean. This bartender did – but he was out of onions. Mr Grant would not have approved. So two martinis it was, twists the size of skateboards, but the gin (Hendrick’s) was icy cold. A good martini is one way to this lady’s heart. But – where’s the beef?
The beef was brought to our table, a huge platter of it, glistening and raw.. You get to look your steak in the eye before you eat it here; if you don’t know the difference between fillet and rib-eye, you will after you go to Goodman. And it was at this moment that my hopes for the place began to rise. True, true, there were two USDA Prime American steaks (meat certified by the US Department of Agriculture), a strip steak and a rib-eye; but our waitress gave us a clear indication – without seeming disloyal, you understand – that these would not be the appropriate choices for connoisseurs such as we.
Instead, she gestured to an Angus rib-eye, a steak for two, grass-fed in the UK and aged for 28 days on the premises. She didn’t insist, you understand; but it was plain she could see into our hearts. How would we like it?
I am always sorry not to be across the Channel when I’m ordering steak: saignant has such a good ring. Neel had sweet herrings – nice to see a concession to the place’s Slavic origins – served pleasingly in a Kilner jar; they were tender and tangy. I had a Caesar salad, which tests a place in the same way a martini can, and though I don’t really hold with fresh, as opposed to salted, anchovies in my Caesar, I’d have to say this was a tasty pile of well-dressed but ungunky romaine; the croutons were thin, garlicky discs of French bread and they were quite delicious.
And the steak? It did not disappoint. At £36 for the two of us, I’d have to say that it was mighty good value, too, served in fat, bloody slices on a wooden board with the bone for me to chew. The menu tells you that the meat is cooked in a special charcoal oven; and indeed the blackened crust of the meat had a darkly carbonised edge, a beautiful contrast with the sweet, delicate, hardly warm heart of the meat.
Chips? Terrific. Fluffy and fat and crisp. Green beans? Swell. Firm and buttery. What more could two carnivores ask?
The music was a little loud, though I guess they’ve got to play some jazz; a shame, though, since a steak dinner is the kind of undistracting treat that allows for good conversation between friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. The steak was gone, the bone gnawed, almost before we knew we’d begun. A glass of 2007 Francis Desbourdes Chinon l’Arpenty, from the Loire (£7.75), slipped down sweetly; the wine list is fine, and decently priced.
Dessert we had for form’s sake. You ought to be able to get a decent crème brûlée in such a place, and indeed you can. Blood orange sorbet was a little on the sweet side for my tastes, but a white peach sorbet was blissful.
This, overall, was dinner: simple but well-executed, smilingly served, a pleasurable meal that doesn’t distract from the real pleasure of good company. You can go there for the USDA Prime, if you like; I imagine that’s what a lot of the suits with their BlackBerries on the table were devouring. But this American girl, should she find herself in Mayfair, will head back for good, grass-fed British beef.
Goodman
26 Maddox Street, London W1
(020-7499 3776)