Holy cow! These are London’s best steak restaurants

Even in this age of enlightened dining, one can’t help but return to that most primal pleasure: steak. Whether your fancy leans towards the high-tone chateaubriand, T-bones that could knock a man out, or cuts from Wagyu cows that lived better lives than you and I, London’s steak scene is both accommodating and accomplished, as deep as it is sophisticated. Cathedrals of meat are present across all the capital’s boroughs, but these are the choice cuts.

One of London’s great culinary legacies is Hawksmoor, an always-reliable home to the glories of steak – T-bones so immense that they could keep open the lobby doors of a five-star hotel, the robust flavours of rump, the primal lust you’ll feel for the standard of quality set by the chateaubriands (you’ve just got to plump for the chateaubriands), all heavily crusted with fistfuls of Maldon salt and handled, flamed and rested just right.

But, if you read beyond its signature calling, it’s also a hub for cooking done well: roasted scallops flavoured with slips of garlic and splashes of white Port; the belly ribs of a Gloucestershire pig, patterned with fat and lifted by the zip of vinegar slaw; triple-cooked chips and beef-dripping fries; and miniature Staub pots heavy with finessed creamed spinach. And the lychee martini is a superb way to end any evening.

• thehawksmoor.com

The last time I visited Blacklock, there was a solo diner to my left absolutely crushing an 800g porterhouse. The server warned him that the order may be too much, that it was really intended for a party of three or more. He waved the objections away and asked for it medium-rare. He ordered no sides, no garnish. Just beef, wine and sauce.

I suppose that kind of says it all about the people who rock up to Blacklock – carnivores who’re there for good meat, a good time and no nonsense. Purists, as the food bloggers may call them. For a decade now, the cult chophouse has been lauded for creating a Friday night feeling throughout every service, its reasonably priced cuts (steaks start at £15) and its say-when approach to dishing out its white-chocolate cheesecake. It’s the All In, however, that may strike the temptation within you – a behemoth mix of pork, beef and lamb chops, piled high like a basket of Sunday laundry and dripping over charcoal-grilled flatbreads. You’d be considered a novice if you didn’t order it with a jug of the house-made chop sauce.

• theblacklock.com

You’ll have no doubt heard about the steak at play here and its price tag (cuts start from about £190 per 100g) – but to discuss the cost is besides the point. The Tajima meat – what many consider the most coveted on the market – is sourced from the Hyogo prefecture, whose capital, Kobe, is the nerve centre of the beef universe. The restaurant makes use of a few small farms throughout the year, and the cows that are bred on those lands could be considered to be some of the most cosseted beasts on Earth, with their diet of hay and specially formulated grains and their access to mineral water that comes from springs located deep beneath the ground. In winter, they wear specially knitted jackets. Their lineage is well documented. They are truly loved by the farmers who rear them. In short, these heifers have a better existence than you and I.

Once ordered, the beef is sliced (250g should suffice), speared, and sprinkled generously with salt and ground pepper. The cut is placed over smouldering charcoal – the batons of binchotan with which chef Kazuo Imayoshi cooks exude no signs of smoke, such is their purity – and the oven door is shut. There are ten temperatures to which your steak can be done, and just by listening to how fast the fat drips, the chef can tell when the cooking is complete. And there it is in front of you, a glossy-sheened meat with a few great potatoes, seasonal vegetables and grapes positioned on the plate’s perimeter. The crust is formed like golden bark, and the middle is of a light pink, interrupted only by the almost translucent channels of fat that streak through it. The profound texture is comparable to chewing thick butter. And the taste is that of an animal that was completely adored.

• aragawa-uk.com

In a time of conscious, substitute dining, Temper is one of those restaurants that dials you back into the glories of great meat. Whole chickens and smooth racks of ribs hang from S-hooks in the central kitchen. Flavour is imparted from smoke emanating from the fire pit. Thick cuts are brought in from English farms, aged in-house, then butchered by the cooks. Some pieces – steaks both on and off the bone among them – are left fairly unadorned, others are served in corn tortillas (the drunken-goat’s-cheese option comes with a shot of tequila; the burnt ends can take your mind to Texas). Anything wrapped in a paratha pretty much splits the difference between a bing and a flatbread. And you’re gonna want to book a seat at the counter to soak up all the heat. Just don’t sleep on the desserts – the deep-dish cookie is a great way to nix the meat sweats.

• temperrestaurant.com

You’ll make your way to this fumey, always-in-motion spot on Park Lane, move straight into the ground-level Cut, Wolfgang Puck’s shrine to singular meat – perhaps the closest London has ever gotten to the great American steakhouse – and you’ll steady the senses with an order of the Infinity Martini from the upstairs bar. You’ll peruse the menu, what can only be described as a sort of directory of beef from across the world – sirloins from America, Australian ribeyes, Japanese cuts sourced from Kagoshima, dry-aged perfection from Britain – and you’ll tell the server how you’d like the chef to cook your cut of choice. There will be sides of puréed potato, wild mushrooms and creamed spinach, lobes of foie gras, and bone marrow seeping from its ends. There might be a chocolate soufflé or burnt Basque cheesecake – or both – to finish things off. And you’ll heave yourself into your hotel room afterwards, wash away the sins of the evening, look hazily around the art deco stylings of the fit-out, and fall into the soft pleasures of the Vispring mattress and Mühldorfer bedding.

In the morning, a trip to the basement gym and the neighbouring pool, which is given a sort of William Morris feel with its floral mosaics, would be a pretty smart move.

• dorchestercollection.com

Even with its butchery name, the real heroes at The Quality Chop House, a church-like setting flush with wooden pews, are the confit potatoes – small, rectangular towers constructed from Maris Pipers that have been mandolined, tossed about with duck fat, baked then fried, cracking with the crisped skin of a perfect Sunday side and just fine with Highland bone-in sirloin. There’s also Welsh rarebit, which has the smokey fragrance of a back-garden barbecue, Mangalitza pork, and ribeye. At the end of your meal, take a knee, look to the skies, and put in a request with the great man above – perhaps for a swift return.

• thequalitychophouse.com

The Connaught hotel is the type of place in which you can spend a long stretch of the week and want for nothing. Big-ticket names Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Hélène Darroze have fed the five-star crowd here for quite some time – the former with his dishes that blend Britain with Southeast Asia, the latter with her elegant multi-course menus – and the Connaught Bar has been a pretty permanent fixture on world’s-best lists ever since its martini trolley was first wheeled out. Scrub off the week at the subterranean spa, and spend the evening being coddled in any one of the pampering rooms upstairs. Primal instincts are well catered to in The Connaught Grill, where the refined interiorwork – from the rosewood-clad corridor to Mira Nakashima’s custom-made wooden fixtures – creates a clean cocoon that underlines all that you’ve come here to sample: first-rate produce roasted over wood fire.

For the regulars, you’ll always find Dover sole, grilled wild prawns and faultless A5 Kobe. On Sundays, there’s Hereford beef rib and black-leg chicken. When it’s the season, the kitchen may prepare some stuffed rabbit saddle with smoked salsify velouté and nettle purée. For those after traditional grill house failsafes, there’s a T-bone, weighing 900g, grass-fed, and dry-aged for 30 days, resulting in a beastly hunk of properly pinked-out meat. Ask for a booth at the far end of the room, where the humungous headboards will disguise your hour or two of meat-intensive overindulgence.

• the-connaught.co.uk

If you ever have the urge for being crushed by food to the point of submission, you could do worse than book in a Sunday lunch at Lutyens Grill, the private wood-panelled room on the ground floor of The Ned, the type of old-school clubby place you might expect in an episode of Mad Men. Throughout the week, you might come to the hotel for its excellent spa, or the Californian fare of Malibu Kitchen, or the live music – but Sundays should be spent tackling the unlimited 45-day-aged rare-breed prime rib, a behemoth hunk of flesh and fat, bone still in, thick enough to play padel with, and available throughout the afternoon until you ask for mercy. Consider the trimmings – Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, veg – as palate cleansers.

• thened.com

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