I was back in Birmingham seeing family last weekend, so this is one of the occasional Dining Outs that does not take place in London, but instead in my fine hometown, which I share with Jack Grealish’s calves and the balti.
I was tasked with choosing a restaurant that would suit all of my family’s tastes – my nan came along so meat and two veg was largely the name of the game. As such, I decided to play it safe and go for a steakhouse. Having heard from some friends at home that it was good, I picked Pasture, which is on Colmore Row, opposite Pigeon Park, where I used to hang out as a teenage emo (it’s very close to a city centre McDonald’s, meaning that it was prime emo overspill territory).
Pasture is one of those sort of nouveau steakhouses – London equivalents might be Blacklock, Hawksmoor, Flat Iron, say; Birmingham doesn’t have any of those yet, but there will be a Blacklock opening there later this year, which I think will do well – where there’s a bit of chop house homage going on, and where they fetishise dry-aging and fat marbling and all the rest of it. This is true at Pasture to the extent to which loads of the cuts of meat are just hanging up behind a glass window in the middle of the restaurant, as much a decoration as the statement-y spherical ceiling lights.
The room itself is massive and flashy and extremely modern. It’s exactly the type of place you see in Instagram Reels all the time, shot in slow panorama, with lots of bright light, very shiny surfaces, and a cocktail list as long as my arm. As you walk in, you enter a bar area at street level with high stools and spots for two eating together. This then opens out into a dining room full of leather booths and reasonably well packed-in tables for bigger groups, all of which are in front of the aforementioned Meat Wall (kind of sounds like something they have to climb on episodes of Gladiators or something).
The Pasture experience, pretty unavoidably, then, is centred around eating steak. This, after all, is a place where the staff get you sat down, and then literally bring out three gigantic cuts of meat (Chateaubriand, Porterhouse, a Flintstones-looking Tomahawk) to your table before you order, to talk you through them. The aim is of course to get you to buy one of the expensive sharing cuts – listed, market style, by weight, on a blackboard in front of the Meat Wall, and crossed off as they’re sold – which I’d imagine works as a decent bit of sales patter, though incidentally, it was also pretty interesting, and I think anything that helps you make an informed choice at a restaurant, especially one where you’re probably going to spend a decent wedge, is a good thing.
Following this little presentation, there was some talk among the table about opting for chicken or fish dishes, but in the end, we had all had it impressed on us that if you’re going to go somewhere like Pasture, then you should probably just commit and get steak. I went the whole hog – more like the whole cow really, heh – and chose a 200g fillet, cooked medium rare (boujie I know but I was visiting in service of my upcoming birthday to be fair so fuck off). You get a sauce along with every steak for good measure, so I picked herby, garlicky chimichurri.
To accompany my big, beautiful steak, I kept the sides pretty simple: a green salad plus chips. When these emerged from the kitchen, however, there was no mistaking that they were steakhouse sides: that is, absolutely balls-to-the-wall, Hulk Hogan sides. The salad was swimming in creamy, Caesar-ish dressing and grated cheese, and the chips (fantastic, by the way, as chips go) glistened bronze in the light, having been cooked, naturally, in beef fat. A baked potato that I’d eyed up on the menu sailed out to a nearby table smothered in cheese sauce. “In for a penny,” the entire menu seemed to say, “in for a pound.”
To rewind a bit, before the mains, we opted for a couple of sharing snacks for the table: some sourdough with butter (whipped and, of course, in keeping with the above, liberally sprinkled with crystals of salt so large you could actually crunch them), and beef shin croquettes, made from the discard from some of the prize cuts, accompanied by some gochujang mayo (if you even order mayo at a restaurant at the minute and it’s not gochujang flavoured did you even really order mayo? And so on). The croquettes, full of moist, stringy meat, were an especially good omen for the food ahead.
When my main arrived, it looked almost stark on the plate: a chunky slab of fillet steak, and a pot of chimichurri, which was small, but which packed a huge amount of flavour, and worked as a really fresh, enlivening accompaniment to the meat.
The steak was cooked just as I’d asked for it. The colour, texture and buttery flavour was consistent all the way through, despite the thickness, and the char on the outside was nicely pronounced. I very rarely have steak at a restaurant, so to order it once in a blue moon and have it live up to your hopes is a nice thing – that’s what I found at Pasture.
Somehow I managed to squeeze in dessert (I had a “chocolate dome” which was as tasty as something chocolate and toffee flavoured is always going to be, though any nuance was kind of wiped out by a hot caramel sauce, poured over brownie and feuilletine and the hard chocolate dome of the name, melted by the sauce, at the table). But as pleasant as that was, the steak – and the chips, I’ll be honest – was far and away the highlight. Have you heard of this “steak and chips” before? Bloody good, you know – you should give it a go. Pasture’s a good place to try it.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.
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Sounds worth a visit! Thank you for being the guinea pig. Say hello to mom from me xx