I don’t know about you but at least for me, there are times when I just crave a good steak or just a chunk of good quality beef. London has a few great steakhouses nowadays; one of which is Goodman (can’t not mention Hawksmoor or MASH here either). Other than Burger & Lobster and Beast, the other restaurant in the Goodman family is Zelman Meats, named after Misha Zelman, the head of the whole group and is a pretty casual steak house, especially compared to the Goodman restaurants themselves. Keep on reading to hear about our visit.
We started with a couple of drinks. I went for a coffee old fashioned and my friend chose a verbena highball. The old fashioned was great, nice and boozy with a rich almosty chocolately coffee-ness to it. The high ball was light and refreshing. It’s always great to start a meal with a nice drink!
For starters, we ordered tiger prawn tempura that came with holy f*ck mayo. The mayo wasn’t really that spicy but it did have a little kick and the prawn was well fried with a crispy light batter; tasty! I also liked that it came on plates that were clearly bought from nearby Chinatown :)
Lobster croquettes. These were delicious! They were so lobstery; the flavour was pretty intense. It had a nice crisp on the outside and the inside was super creamy with big chunks of lobster in it. As starters go, these were both pretty good.
Our sides arrived before the beef. First up was the paprika roasted cauliflower that came on a bed of hummus and a scattering of pomegranate seeds. The hummus was good quality, the pomegranate seeds more tart than sweet and the caulflower chunky and well roasted with a coating of paprika. Not bad.
The chips were a little disappointing actually. They were big and fat but not quite as crisp as I’d hoped. They weren’t bad, just didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Now onto the beef. We’d ordered some Canadian ribeye, some beef rib and sliced picanha. We decided to take it easy so didn’t order too much; pretty much all of it is sold by weight so we had about 1kg of meat in total. The picanha is the pink slices of meat (bottom left) and were full of flavour, the rib on the right was super tender and had a lovely layer of fat on it. The ribeye is my favourite cut and this was pretty good!
All in all, the place isn’t bad, but what counts against it is that there is little to make me choose here instead of a Hawksmoor or a MASH or even big brother Goodman. It’s all good, but just not quite as good as the others and so while I enjoyed this meal, if I had to choose, unfortunately, I don’t think Zelman would make the top of the list.
Zelman Meats Soho, 2 St Anne’s Court, Soho, London, W1F 0AZ
