PASTURE | FOOD REVIEW
8-10 High Street, Cardiff. www.pasturerestaurant.com/locations/cardiff
Pasture is most definitely not for the faint of heart, or those who try not to think about the path their food takes from field to fork. There is so much meat on open display – chunks stacked behind glass counters, huge hunks lined up on racks and hanging from hooks – that it might feel as though you’re dining in a butcher’s shop. The newest arrival on Cardiff’s High Street doesn’t cater solely for carnivores, but I pity anyone who has to make do with flame-grilled vegetables, however good they may be.
Short rib croquettes start us off in style, rich strands of beef encased in a crunchy crumb coating. Each golden globe sits on a blob of gochujang aioli, whose fiery kick perhaps isn’t quite the right complement – but at a fiver for four, this might well be the best quality-for-price dish to be found anywhere in the capital. Our other starter is more polarising: raw chopped steak pressed into a rectangular slab, served with charcoal mayo and black tapioca crackers, all revealed with a flourish from beneath a steaming bowl. Resembling a vampire’s platter, it’s visually stunning and barely any less delicious – but its showy extravagance seems somewhat out of keeping with the rest of the menu.
Onto the main event, and the sharpest steak knives known to man. Or so we foolishly at first suspect. In reality, our medium-rare chateaubriand – nicely charred on the outside but (literally) bloody gorgeous within – is so spectacularly tender that you could probably cut it with your thumb. While the dripping-doused chips could be chunkier, my initial grumbles about the peppercorn-free sauce prove to be unfounded (they’ve merely sunk to the bottom) and the cheesy spinach and leek gratin is the perfect side.
Throw in a pint of Tiny Rebel’s Clwb Tropica, a French 75 and a large glass of red, plus a respectable tip for our tag-team servers, and the bill is also not for the faint of heart. But it’s worth it, especially for a birthday blowout lunch as another lockdown approaches, and we waddle out onto the street, two five-days-a-week veggies deep in a steak coma from which we’ll only awake as the sun sets.
words and photos BEN WOOLHEAD