Pasture is a steakhouse in Birmingham’s city centre, airy, cavernous and flooded with light. There’s a glass-fronted ageing room, in which sit various hunks of cow, the dark crimson flesh swirled with alabaster fat. And despite it being a Monday lunch time, the place is encouragingly busy, with tables downing wine and beer with the sort of thirsty gusto usually associated with a Friday afternoon.
Part of a small group of restaurants (there are two others, in Bristol and Cardiff), Pasture takes its provenance seriously. Its steaks are hewn from British grass-fed beef and dry aged in the aforementioned chamber, while much of the produce is grown at the restaurants’ Somerset farm.
The birch charcoal used in the vast grills is a by-product of the furniture industry (who knew?), while most of the bread, beer and ice cream is reassuringly local. So far, so sustainable.
From left: tomahawk steak, spinach gratin and porterhouse with béarnaise
But while this is all highly commendable, it counts for the square root of bugger all if the food is second rate. Which it’s not. There’s a plump lozenge of char siu pork belly, soft as a sybarite’s resolve, with a crisp curl of crackling, and a blob of wonderful barbecue sauce. Short-rib croquettes, expertly fried, have a low, sonorous moo.
Then steak, half a kilo of Chateaubriand, cooked rare, properly seasoned and gloriously charred. I usually prefer the lustier chew of a sirloin or rump, but this is a magnificent piece of meat, with the deep savour of a life well lived. There’s even a whisper of funk.
Fat chips are fried in beef dripping, and are very fine indeed, especially when dipped in a pot of brown butter béarnaise. Chimichurri, verdantly perky, stops things getting too overwhelmingly rich. Even the tomato salad, so often a sullen, fridge-cold afterthought, is filled with intensely sweet, room-temperature fruit.
Service is as good as you’ll find anywhere, warm but well-drilled. And this is a place where lingering is positively encouraged, and an espresso martini (or two) makes the perfect pudding. Creating a successful restaurant is about so much more than just food – it’s an eternally whirring machine, made up of a hundred different parts, greased by pure hard graft. Pasture does what it does very well indeed and is proof, if proof be needed, that there are shards of the joyous in the general doom and gloom.
About £50 per head. Pasture, 15 Colmore Row, Birmingham; pasturerestaurant.com
