It’s disappointingly inevitable that after doing so much to help local food charities during the pandemic and teaming up with Marcus Rashford to support the footballer’s End Child Food Poverty campaign, Tom Kerridge should become a target for those sniping about prices at his two-Michelin starred pub the Hand & Flowers in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.
The introduction of sirloin steak to the menu for £87 has drawn accusations of elitism, with one person pointing out that this is the roughly a day’s salary for the average Briton. The chef, however, is unrepentant.
“Yes, it’s an £87 steak,” he says, “but it’s not something you can buy from Waitrose. It’s not just a lump of meat thrown in front of you with some cheap fries. We’ve worked very hard to source the best piece of beef that we can find.
“It’s like saying you can have a Skoda or a Bentley. They both do the same thing, both of them will sit in the traffic on the M6, but they are very different cars and the decision about which you want to buy is up to you.”
As Kerridge points out, you are not just paying for the steak, you are paying for the building, the rent, the rates, the staff . . . “This is the true cost of what things are. Restaurants have spent so many years trying to undercut each other and pay staff minimum wage and then expect them to work 80 hours a week.
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“Actually, no. We pay staff properly and get them to work a normal set of hours like everyone else. I’m very happy with that, and the criticism [of prices] is water off a duck’s back.”
Besides, by elite steak house standards, £87 isn’t even exceptional. For those who can afford it, the 10oz sirloin of 30-day-aged beef does sound a very special piece of meat. It comes from only the top 1 per cent of beef bought by Dovecote butchers from 500 farms up and down the country.
When you order it, you are given a QR code so you can see a video of the meat’s journey, from farm, through butchery and ageing, to the Hand & Flowers kitchen, where it is heavily caramelised in butter and served with onion rings, sauce bordelaise and béarnaise, plus Kerridge’s famous triple-fried chips.
That’s more than can be said of CUT at 45 Park Lane, the steak restaurant of the celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, where the French fries are an extra £9. That’s on top of the £128 they ask for the wagyu 21-day-aged sirloin from Earl Stonham Farms in Suffolk. If you want pure-breed Japanese wagyu — a genetically unique breed revered for the sweet, umami flavour of its richly marbled meat — a smaller 6oz sirloin of top quality A5 beef from the Kagoshima prefecture is £154.
That marbling is all important since protein has no taste, so it is the melting strands of fat that convey the flavour of the steak and also help it to remain succulent. The other important factor is a lack of stress during the cow’s life (and ultimately slaughter) because this can make it tough and bitter. The careful husbandry required for a placid life goes a long way to explain why good beef is always expensive.
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Londoners are still awaiting the chance to try the restaurant world’s most expensive steak. Nusret Gokce, aka Salt Bae, the celebrity-loving chef famous mainly for the extravagant way he sprinkles salt on to steak (it’s an Instagram thing), was supposed to have opened his latest Nusr-Et Steakhouse at the Park Tower Knightsbridge Hotel in May.
Still no sign, so for now we can only dream of the $600 steaks embalmed in 24-carat edible gold leaf that are a hallmark of his restaurants around the world. Taste comes in many different guises — and clearly at price points to match.
