Malmaison Aberdeen, Aberdeen - Restaurants in Aberdeen | s1play.com

Food to make you coo

Review published on 01/06/2009 © Sunday Herald

Over the years, I have observed Aberdonians’ fondness for steaks. Believe me, though steaks are a restaurant fixture elsewhere, the Granite City has a larger appetite for them than most. Naturally there’s the local connection with that venerable breed, the Aberdeen Angus, but the restaurants here positively vie with one another to do the biggest, most impressive steak. How grateful our beef farmers must be for this loyalty, what with all those vegans telling us to cut out red meat to save the planet.

Aberdeen’s steak stakes have been raised to new heights by the Malmaison chain, which has set up shop in the city’s posh west end. Let me explain. The Mal sources all its beef from the estimable Donald Russell Meats in Inverurie, royal warrant holder and gold standard purveyor of pasture-reared meat. This operation dry-ages its beef for 28 days in the traditional manner, by which time the flesh looks dark red and quite dry, totally different from your typical supermarket, cereal-fed, barely hung beef that looks ruby red and wet.

Most restaurants, if they buy Donald Russell meat, don’t have the ideal place to store it. Most likely it will sit vacuum-packed in plastic in the fridge until an order comes through. But the Mal has taken dedication to steak a step further by building a temperature-controlled room for hanging whole sides of beef, and laying out the steaks unwrapped, so that the good work done up at Inverurie isn’t undone at the last minute. It is glass-fronted, and it’s an amazing sight to see such fine beef, with its marbling of creamy-coloured fat through the flesh. And if that wasn’t enough, the kitchen has a Josper charcoal oven (chefs crave these the way home cooks do Agas and Lacanche ranges). So now you’ve got all the makings of the perfect steak: fantastic meat, expert ageing, thoughtful storage and the ideal equipment to cook it.

For once, I ditched my steak-avoidance policy to try the Mal’s signature steak, a 700g bone-in rib eye. It was indeed sublime, deliciously smoky and darkly carbonised on the extremities (it was a delight to gnaw the bone) and beautifully rosy within. It was served with a copper cocotte of impeccable Béarnaise sauce, heady with tarragon, hand-cut chips and grilled tomato. The best bit, though, was a disc of bone, still with its milky-rich marrow. (The Mal should stick this marrow, with parsley salad, on its menu as a stand-alone dish, in the style pioneered by Fergus Henderson’s St John restaurant in London.)

It isn’t just the steaks the Mal is getting right. The Dornoch lamb cutlet – not from the Josper oven, this time – served with a mini shepherd’s pie matched the calibre of the beef offering.

But don’t think it’s all meat, meat, meat here. This is an interesting menu offering piscine delights like John Dory, Cornish sea bass from “day” boats, dived scallops and the like. Vegetarians certainly won’t starve either. What wasn’t to like about a starter of green (English) and white (French) asparagus served with a poached duck egg and doused with white truffle dressing? The only gripe about a vegetarian special (artichoke, morel and Dunsyre Blue tart) was that there were no morels, just some lesser fungi in the form of pleurottes. That said, the shortcrust pastry was brilliant, the whole thing was stiff with generous chunks of freshly prepared artichoke heart and the cheese lubricated it nicely.

The Malmaison chain makes a feature of its “home-grown and local” menu – a great idea but some dishes here were puzzling. The chocolate and griottine cherry clafoutis, for instance. It’s too early even for Kentish cherries, and Grampian doesn’t exactly have the climate for cocoa beans. I was intrigued, too, by the “platter of locally cured meats”, hoping they might come from the impressive Wark Farm near Alford, until the waiter told me they came from Italy.

If there is a weak spot here, it’s the desserts. A potentially knockout lemon meringue pie with tip-top pastry and curdy filling had a cloying sugary-gritty topping. A creamy rhubarb fool missed that essential custard component. Overall though, Malmaison is a class act setting new standards for Aberdeen’s eating-out scene.