I tried my hand at a beef wellington. It looks more like a sausage roll, largely due to me using pre-cut fillet steak, rather than an entire fillet. At £30 a pop for one, I think I’ll live with the shape.
Last month we tried mincing our own burgers and also tried the prawn cook-off challenge to see if we could tell the difference between fresh and frozen prawns.
What was the natural successor to these two events? A homemade burger challenge of course.
The premise was simple: two cuts, rump and rib eye. Which would produce the best burger?
Let the mincing begin!
The results were good in both cases. Both cuts are fairly fatty when it comes to steak, but the rump produced a slightly fattier burger, making it Elina’s favourite. I preferred the rib eye.
A week later we also tried it with a sirloin. Sirloin is leaner, so produced a more meatier burger.
Given that Venla was due to arrive a few weeks before, I knew my 30th birthday was probably going to be a busy one. We started by going to register Venla so she could be a real human being, officially.
For lunch, we dropped by Miller & Carter. They have a starter platter containing fish, chicken and duck, then we had steak, with a bacon and honey mustard salad. I think that makes five animals. Finally we finished off with my parents for dinner and seeing family. Not a bad way to spend a day.
After a week of eating fish, we were in the mood of something different. Realistically, there is only so many times you can walk past a place called Chuck Norris Grill and not venture in.
The decor did not disappoint.
Disappointingly, the food itself was not Chuck Norris themed. They could manage a reasonably-well cooked steak however.
Having been battered by Icelandic prices for a week, it was nice to go somewhere a little cheaper. I do not have a desire to go back, but it is a reasonable joint to visit once.
After our final tournament day of the season, we (Leeds Samurai) stopped off in Skipton to visit the pirate-themed restaurant Calico Jack.
It was okay. I go the steak and ribs combo. The steak was over-cooked. I asked for it medium and you might be able to argue that it was medium-well if you were being generous, but I would not have argued if you had called it well done. The ribs were reasonably tender, but not a patch on Cattle Grid of TGI. Similarly I thought the coleslaw and potato wedges were just very average.
It’s a cool place to go, and everyone seemed to be happy with their meal. I feel there is definitely room for improvement food-wise though.
The Seabirds is a pub slash restaurant in Flamborough village.
It’s a relatively small place and the service was snappy. I started with the prawn cocktail which was a bit of a disappointment. The salad bed, usually lettuce, had lots of other ingredients in including celery, pepper and cucumber. This over complicated a simple dish and with a shortage of sauce on it, didn’t produce a good result. Elina fared better with her goat’s cheese.
My main was an improvement. The posh surf and turf consisted of a rump steak with half a lobster on top. Some of the steak was cooked correctly but a lot of it wasn’t (it was two halves of different thicknesses) and the lobster was covered in a cheese sauce – I have yet to decide whether this was a good thing or bad thing.
We finished things off with a cheese cake that was delicious and had a surprisingly amount of alcohol in the base. An enjoyable meal but for the price, I was expecting the food to be a little better.
The letter campaign starts here.
To Whom It May Concern:
I have long been a fan of your restaurant, which I believe to be the finest Thai restaurant in Leeds.
One of the reasons I have enjoyed your restaurant so much is that you had a dish which consisted of Thai curry sauce, in a Yorkshire pudding, on a steak. As you’re no doubt aware, this is a dish that consists of the three most awesome foods in existence, and was therefore the greatest dish ever.
However, while dining at your restaurant in February, it appeared that the item had been removed from your menu.
If indeed it has been removed, I believe this to be a grave mistake, and one that I would implore you to reconsider.
Your restaurant created what is almost certainly the greatest dish that ever has existed and ever will exist, and for it to be lost forever to the annuals of history would be a great tragedy.
Please consider reintroducing it onto your menu.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Chris Worfolk
Since sending this, I received a very nice reply from Chaophraya saying my feedback would be considered at their regular menu reviews.
Where better to celebrate a birthday than Blackhouse?
Last week, we headed down to the new steak house located on the Headrow, Miller & Carter.
Despite having just opened, it was actually relatively quiet. We are able to walk up without a reservation, and I would say only about 30% of the tables were occupied – though there were enough people in there to give it some atmosphere.
Was it the best steak I’ve had in Leeds? No. But George claimed that his was. My personal opinion was that it can’t match the top tier of Blackhouse and Gaucho, but it was still an excellent steak, and certainly not somewhere I would be adverse to going back to.
