Zelman Meats, 2 St Anne’s Court, London W1 (020 7437 0566). Meal for two including drinks: £50-£80
I first met Misha Zelman in the autumn of 2006, in a supermarket café on the outskirts of Moscow. He had been described to me as a restaurateur with “almost unlimited” funds. The ritual that attended the meeting backed this up. I was driven out to meet him in a 4x4 with tinted windows, bodyguards in the front and bucket seats in the back – the essential accessories for any self-respecting baby oligarch. Zelman himself was rather unprepossessing: a soft, open, babyish face, big blue eyes and full pink lips. He was just 29, but had a nice line in grandeur and rhetoric. He had a small chain of steakhouses in Moscow called Goodman. Their slogan: “Good steaks for good men”, because who cares what good women want? “Goodman’s will be like Starbucks one day,” he said.
I left the meeting believing him to be sweetly deluded and sodden with ludicrous macho posturing and bravado. In short, absolutely normal for Moscow, an entire city mired in undiagnosed psychosis and rage, as one old Russian hand put it to me. I expected never to hear of him again. I was wrong, but to be fair, so was he. Goodman opened in London on Maddox Street in Mayfair and was nothing like Starbucks. It set a new standard for steakhouses in London and entered a friendly rivalry with the Hawksmoor group for best grilled cow house in the capital.
Later he opened Burger & Lobster, which pretty much invented the limited-repertoire restaurant by offering only an underpriced lobster and an overpriced burger, both for £20. It’s been a raging success. There are now nine in London, with other outposts in Sweden, Kuwait and New York. Branches in Cardiff and Manchester are apparently not doing so well. Outside the M25, a £20 burger is about as welcome as an outbreak of chlamydia.
Next there was the upmarket version, the hilarious Beast, which knocks out king crab and steak for £85 a head, and is as over-engineered a restaurant as it’s possible to find. Think of it as a luxury stretch Hummer compared to a Ford Mondeo. Some of us pointed and laughed. It continues to do business.
And then there is the low-slung site on St Anne’s Court in Soho, a space which has been through a prolonged identity crisis, from New York deli to tapas joint to booze barn hosed down with cheap vodka. Zelman took it over and launched a fun, reasonably priced fish restaurant called Rex & Mariano, which reduced costs by replacing waiters with iPads. They sold heaps of clams at £6.
But London doesn’t want heaps of clams right now. It wants meat, which is something this lot know about. So they closed, put in red leather booths and a huge smoker and reopened as Zelman Meats doing a narrow menu of beef cuts: that’s short rib and sirloin, rump and chateaubriand, generally by the 100g, as well as triple-cooked chips and the like. And here, standing next to my table on a Sunday lunchtime, is Zelman himself. He is waiting tables. He moved to London a couple of years ago. Clearly the decision suited him. Beast aside, the baby-oligarch bravado appears to have gone. He talks in a furious rush about being a Russian Jew, of what the privations during the Soviet Union had been like, and how everything since then has been a way to bury that past. “I started as chef,” he says. “And sometimes I am still chef. You want lunch?”
Yes, we want lunch. And we get it. We get lunch the way the Sahara gets sun, the way Kylie gets adored. We get it in slices of beef, the pink of a taffeta ballgown, with crisped ribbons of fat, and a deep flavour of earth and field that goes on long after you’ve slurped it down. We get it in proper roasties and jugs of gravy and Yorkshires. The last time I had a Sunday lunch like this was at the Lamplighter Dining Rooms in the Lake District, where the generosity of spirit entirely suited the domestic setting. To find it like this in gentrifying Soho feels unlikely but welcome.
On Sundays they offer sirloin or rump, with roast potatoes, green beans and gravy for £19.95. An extra quid for the Yorkshires seems bizarre, but my, what Yorkshires they are, all tumescence and crispness. As he delivers the plates Zelman says: “We do a small number of things, but we do them well.” I find it very hard to argue.
Across two trips I try a number of other things. Because the group brings in beef animals whole, they have a ready supply of short ribs, which they smoke for 12 hours and glaze and glaze again. They cost between £10 and £16 each, depending on size, and are a beautiful thing, the outer crust giving way to a thin layer of fat and then the soft fibrous meat beneath. Just as good is their thickly spiced brisket, sold at £6 per 100g. It, too, has taken a 12-hour smoking, which is what this cut needs before it will yield to your fork. Their BBQ sauce is punchy and rich, with a strong balance of acidity to sweetness. I am far less taken with their chimichurri sauce, that Argentine blitz of fresh herbs, garlic and vinegar which here lacks depth.
There are oysters to start, both naked and toasted under breadcrumbs with the tiresomely blunt instrument which is the cult Holy Fuck chilli sauce, made by the Rib Man, a well-known street food operator. (I’ve always found machismo around chilli burn tiresome.) Sides include half a roast cauliflower with humus and pomegranate seeds, which suggests an amiable steal from Berber and Q. For once, triple-cooked chips with parmesan and truffle are worth the £8 price tag. There is just the one dessert, but it’s a doozy: a proper slab of apple pie, crisp pastry above and below, sweet sticky apple still retaining its bite within, with a big splodge of gelato-style vanilla ice cream.
Pricing for the food, given the cost of beef, feels keen. The wine list, however, starts uncompromisingly in the mid-20s, which seems odd given the younger crowd they appear to be aiming at. Indeed Zelman Meats feels like the entry level for the business. You start here, move on to Goodman when you get a pay rise, and when you finally have more money than sense, go to Beast. Personally I think I’ll just stay here.
Jay’s news bites
■ Zelman Meats feels like a companion piece to Shotgun BBQ, a short walk away on Kingly Street. The menu is looser, focusing on pork (have the Boston Butt), duck, chicken and beef, and has a few showboating items, like whole pigs’ ears with pancakes. But it’s all very good indeed. It trades the industrial chic of Zelman for down-home charm, complete with aspidistras. Great cocktails, too (shotgunbbq.com).
■ Yet another victim of Mayfair’s costs: Eric Chavot’s well-received restaurant Brasserie Chavot – oh those soft shell crabs – has ceased trading from the Westbury Hotel on London’s Conduit Street. He’s hoping to announce a new venue this month (brasseriechavot.com).
■ From the shoot-me-now department: independent drinks business Global Brands has launched ready-to-drink cocktails, including a Mojito, a Cosmo and a Singapore Sling. They come in jam jars. JAM. JARS. If this doesn’t mark the end of western civilisation as we know it, I don’t know what does (globalbrands.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
