Fiesta del Asado, 229 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B16 9RP. Tel: 0121 455 9331
8/10
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.. Richard McComb goes South American for his final Post restaurant review.
It is my fifth anniversary as restaurant reviewer for the Birmingham Post. Happy birthday to me.
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You forgot to send flowers, too? Don’t worry. You can still send them – and I address this especially to Jamie Oliver and Marco Pierre White, whose restaurants in Birmingham have provided the culinary backdrop for some of my most lively reviews. The thing is, I won’t be here.
I have broken bread for the final time. There will be no more amuse bouches on my watch. It’s curtains for canapés.
For reasons explained in my weekly column for today’s Post, I am leaving the newspaper. This is, in effect, The Last Supper.
If I could have looked into a crystal ball back in April 2007, I am pretty sure I would not have foreseen that my final foray into Brummie dining for the Post would have been preceded by the phrase: “Darling, how about popping out for an Argentinian?”
But lo, it came to pass. We hopped on our horses and rode across the Hagley Road pampas to Fiesta del Asado. Was it any good? Well, you can see from the score below that it was. But what the score does not tell you is how good the steak was. So, how good was the steak? Bloody marvellous. And the reason for this is that the cooking had not been mucked about with. A great hunk of meat is thrown on to a grill, left alone, flipped, left alone, removed, rested and served.
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This technique is so tricky to master that I would say 90 per cent of restaurant chefs get it wrong. Stick the same professionals in their home kitchen and they are fine. Transport their dazzling talents to a commercial kitchen and everything goes pear-shaped. They try too hard. They feel the need to be cheffy.
If five years’ reviewing has taught me one thing about the art of restaurant cooking, it is this: the vast majority of chefs would benefit from keeping things simple. Simple can be perfection. As Forrest Gump might have said: “Simple is as simple does.” Chefs and their bosses, who too often are lifestyle philanderers rather than restaurateurs, would do well to follow La Philosophie de la Gastronomie Gump (©).
Chef Aktar Islam, one of the three directors of Fiesta del Asado, would be the first to admit that he once dabbled in the dark arts of cheffiness. His style is now complemented by substance. If a dish requires a flourish, he will do it. If less is more, he will do that, too. One of the real pleasures of dining out on the Post’s coin has been watching the development and growing maturity of the city’s exciting new generation of chefs. Islam is firmly in this bracket. He is the culinary brains behind the success of Lasan, off St Paul’s Square, which he runs with Jabbar Khan. The duo launched Asado late last year with marketing entrepreneur Andrew Kleanthous and the trio are very much a hands-on presence at the new venture.
I first visited the restaurant just before Christmas and the place has bedded in extremely well in the intervening months. I am hopeless at describing decor but there is wood, South American nick-nacks (I love the old phone hanging from a wall) and tons of warmth. The design proposal was to create the ambiance of Argentinian-style, informal, rustic, celebratory eating and the boys have done good.
We sat by a wood-burning stove – yes, a proper one, with wood and heat and everything – when we visited last Friday. It had been a chilly ride over the Rio Chad and the peaks of Edgbaston and the sight of a log fire acted like a rush of serotonin.
We chomped on lovely (room temperature) marinated gordal olives, stuffed with spicy guindilla, and divine jamon Iberico de bellota, from acorn-munching porkers before the entradas made their entrada.
We will have to pop back for the empanadas because this night was all about the meat. The morcilla curada, a smoky black sausage served with lightly dressed leaves and onion, is a total must. It is less fatty than your butcher’s version but far sweeter thanks to caramelised onion. For those who baulk at blood sausage, this represents a soft, and very pleasant, landing. The garlicky house sausage is also good, but the morcilla curada (it’s actually French) is top peso. We also liked the warm morrones asados, roasted pequillo peppers stuffed with black olives and melty feta cheese.
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The rib eye steak I had at Christmas was fine, if unspectacular. Since then, Islam has perfected cooking on the parrilla grill and worked on the house dry rub. Significantly, a section of cuts marketed as a “taste of the old country” has been added to the menu.
Sally and I split a bife de ancho, a whopping 38oz of prime, 2.5-inch thick, rib eye steak, grilled slowly on the bone. It is the best steak I have had in Birmingham. It is as simple as that.
The ancho may not be the most tender steak I have had but I will trade tenderness for flavour any day, on any continent. And here’s a thing: it is actually good fun, and viscerally appealing, to have a chew on tasty flesh. The steak costs £41.89, so that’s just over 20 quid each. In your face, MPW. (I haven’t been to MPW since that review. It might be brilliant now. I’ll have to find out. The new-ish GM is a star and if he can’t get it right we might as well toss ourselves off the top of The Cube.)
Following research in Argentina, Islam is keen to introduce Birmingham diners to the textures, flavours and challenges of “old country” cuts. Some work better than others. The Asado de tira, a 16oz four-bone cross-cut beef rib sounds and looks terrific but the chef hasn’t quite nailed the cooking, which I’ll hazard a guess requires an even slower, longer sitting on the parrilla. But I admire the idea. Knowing Islam, he will get it bang on.
Sally and our daughters had a panna cotta and churros with chocolate sauce to finish and I, rather bizarrely, ordered a cognac and a Cointreau. By now, I was experiencing a temporary state of meat madness, which must explain the unorthodox digestif combo.
Still, I happily do it all again.