Off the back of some handy decorations – a top 50 placing in a 101 World’s Best Steak Restaurants list, and a National Restaurant Award nomination – owner and chef Sam Elliott gives Emma Way the lowdown about Pasture, his beefy baby in Cardiff city centre.
Fire cooking is at the heart of what we do. It’s in our mantra, ‘Fire Meat Music’. I think cooking with fire, as a technique, is very primitive, and it’s also very challenging. Training to cook with fire can have different temperatures, different stages of fire cooking, right from ignition all the way through to embers. In terms of other cooking techniques, they are all largely centred around fire rather than your traditional cooking methods.
The most challenging ingredient to work with is our main ingredient – steak. Largely because every guest has their own cooking preference. You’re ranging from various weights of meat, from a 200-gram fillet steak all the way up to a 1.2 kilo tomahawk. In terms of challenges that you face, you’ve got different preferences of cooking temperature, you’ve got different-sized steaks, and you’re cooking on a natural ingredient, which is fire.
Being ranked 48th in the 101 World’s Best Steak Restaurants of 2024 is an incredible achievement, something I’m incredibly proud of. The team works really, really hard on a daily basis to ensure that our product is as good as it can be. That goes right the way down, from the procurement of our meat, working with farmers to rear cattle correctly on pasture, hence the name Pasture. We dry-age all of the meat in-house, cooking it over fire. And then you’ve got the actual restaurant and the amazing staff that we’ve got serving our guests.

I was fortunate enough to have some agricultural land in Bristol, where I live, and being a chef I’ve always had a passion for growing produce and making the restaurant as sustainable as possible. We’ve been farming now on Buttercliffe Farm for five years; we grow all sorts of vegetables, herbs and micro cresses, and fruit and flowers for all three restaurants. I’ve got a full-time farmer called Farmer Tom – he manages it for Pasture – and we’ve also got two part-time workers now on the farm.
I think sustainability should be important to everyone right now. There’s so much going on in the world that’s going to impact our future and our children’s future. I think everyone should be thinking about sustainability, especially big restaurants, they can have such a positive impact or a negative impact. It’s important that every restaurant owner and restaurant operation puts sustainability at the top of their list, in my opinion.
Fifty-five per cent of dishes on our menu are vegetarian and vegan. The farm really helps with that, because we’re growing so much amazing produce. You’d be surprised how many vegans actually come through the doors at Pasture, because it’s a great learning experience. Cooking vegetables on fire, in my opinion, is almost as good as cooking meat over fire, if not better. We’ve got a great dish called cabbage in the coals, where you let vegetables naturally cook in embers. Sometimes veggie and vegan recipes aren’t taken as seriously as they should be; they’re a bit of an afterthought.

On our farm we planted a vineyard three years ago, so we’re now into our third year. We’ve got 3,000 grapevines which will produce up to 9,000 bottles of wine. We’ve got a blend of two varieties, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc. To be able to offer our wine in the restaurants, is a first, I think, in UK restaurants.
Info: pasturerestaurant.com
words EMMA WAY
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