Steak secrets

“What will you have, the bird or the beef ?” This was a question that air-hostesses on Australian airlines would ask their guests as they leaned forward at lunchtime. It never failed to stun Indian visitors flying to Sydney or Melbourne for the first time. What the hostesses meant to ask actually was this; “Will you have the chicken or the steak?”
Extending this logic to our own experience of looking for the perfect steak in Chennai, it would be best to ask the Chef, “What are you serving today, the bull or the buff ?” For it’s a well-known fact that most of the steaks that you are likely to find at our local steak houses is from the buffalo, rather than the bull.
In the 80s, anyone who wanted to eat a steak would head straight to Bengaluru, when it was still a leafy laidback city. You got the best steaks in small cafes frequented by hordes of visitors who had hit the hippie trail. The one and only Haroon, the owner of The Only Place at the end of Brigade Road, was something of a connoisseur.
“It’s a secret taught to me by the hippies who came here in the 60s,” he would claim mysteriously. There was nothing Haroon did not know about creating the perfect steak. “It depends on the grass and water and air that the cattle eat,” he would say. He would then go on about getting a butcher to cut the meat in the proper way, tenderize the steaks with specific ingredients, which may have been a personal concoction of engine oil and turpentine for all we know and beating the fillets with a smart mallet until they were totally soft and tender, whether you wanted to eat them raw, medium rare or well-done. No matter what Haroon’s steaks, the mounds of mashed potato, the rings of fried onions were all the stuff of which culinary memories are made.
It’s because of this that any visitor from Bengaluru turns his or her hooves up at the quality of steaks that’s served in Chennai. Yes, it’s true that things are changing, you can be lucky and get a good steak at cafe style places that are as diverse as Dewberry, Tangerine, or the Steak house, or the newest of them all, Mash the Grill House on Haddows Road. The Grill house looks like a retro Bengaluru steak house. It has an ambitious menu that gives you the whole gamut of steak options, but dear reader, do not ask whether it’s the real thing. The two pepper sauce steak we tried would have had a hollow laugh from Haroon. It was as stringy as a string cot left in the rain. It was but a poor cousin of the two-pepper sauce served at Pondicherry’s Satsanga, another great place for steaks. We had it once with cold medallions of steak, partnered with a rich sauce that actually had ground peppercorns and of course the French fries and lightlysteamed vegetables.
We are leaving out the star hotels that serve steaks that have been reared on the pampas grass of South America, or the cold hillsides of New Zealand. We just mention in passing that you can get an Emu steak at the Emu restaurant. It’s a steak that is also a bird, so what more can be said about it. This leaves just one option. You have to seek it out at the end of the popcorn alley on the third level of the Express Avenue mall. It’s a small restaurant called Dine and dine you can on the best steaks, made and served with the most glorious mushroomfilled sauce created by their own Chef Srinivasan.
Then again, maybe he has an unfair advantage. Ask him where he gets his steaks from and though we will not reveal the source, it’s clear that Chennai is not a place for steaks.