fillet signature cut douglasdale

2 April 2013

There are a lot of disappointing things in life. When someone drinks your beer, for example, when you order extra length pants and they still only end at your shins, when an abnormally large pigeon drops a load on your freshly polished car and when you step onto a fallen autumn leaf and it doesn’t crunch under your foot. There is nothing, however, that is more disappointing than crappy food.

This month our record breaking steak club attendance filled the skirts of the biggest table at Fillet Signature Cut. It was a fairly quiet evening and eleven of us crowded the centre spot under the chandelier. The dark wood and sombre lighting added to the overall auspiciousness of the evening - our previous chairman Sean was back up in Joburg and joined us after being subjected to whatever they served during his missing-in-action months in the Cape. I was happy that he had arrived as I got to get shot of the baby blue girls' tennis hat that he had left at my house. Maybe he's a Blue Bulls supporter..

We were a marketing professionals nightmare - all the drinks in the first round seemed to be unique - there was a whiskey, a brandy, a beer, some wine and even a glass of water. I’m not surprised really, as there was no beer on tap.. not even Castle. Fortunately, everybody seemed to recover sufficiently to settle in to their varied respective beverage after the "no beer on tap" tragedy had passed.

The menu really focuses on fillet. There was fillet everything - from kebabs to mignon, from traditional pan-fried to steak rolls, from Portuguese style to covered in mushrooms. A great variety that could keep your taste buds coming back every day of the week. If it wasn't for Dr Gavin nobody would have known that there was also some kind of salad on the menu too. We decided that he would probably outlive all of us and would have no friends during his short finals and that it would serve him right for ordering a salad at steak club.

Most of the chaps ordered the fillet on the bone arrangement. It was a 600g beast that needed even bigger, even sturdier plates than at Giles the previous month. There wasn’t any crockery acrobatics from Pete this time. After the excitement of the successful morph suit acquisition, he seemed pretty content to behave himself.

Like the right amount of salt and vinegar flavour on a Simba chip requires a careful balance that doesn’t make your face suck itself into itself, but also doesn’t leave you wanting more, the level of charred-ness of a steak needs to account for the sweet piquant peaking of flavours on the tongue and play them off the more subtle beefiness of the meat. Each to his own, I guess, but my steak’s char level was absolutely perfect. I had the 200g pan-fried fillet, with a trinchado starter as a side. Like being torn between whether you think Kirsten Dunst is hot or not, the trinchado sauce was unbelievably good, but the meat was overcooked, rubbery, tough at the same time as being flavourless. It’s the same conundrum of Ms Dunst's hot body / weird face arrangement. You want more of only one thing, but have to concede the one to get the other. 

The pan fried lump was the redemption, it made everything in the world good again. Everything that a fillet should be, this was. Like biblical heros parting the sea, I had only to wave my knife at it and it separated into a convenient bite size chunk. After appreciating the naked elegance of the first bite, I smothered the rest in the jalapeno and blue cheese sauce and got stuck in. I disappeared into another happy world with each mouthful. But, and there had to be a but, the whole thing was too good. It was too good to be perfect. It was by the book rather than a masterpiece. Like a planned night out is good, but those circumstantial parties that just happen are better.

The steak was fantastic, the trinchado gets a Dunst rating and I’m sure the salad was lovely. 

Overall, there were no disappointing mouthfuls and thus no crappy food here.

After letting digestion take its natural course we sat back to enjoy the last drinks of the evening and welcomed Woody to the steak club fray by making him say as many umms as possible.

There was talk of motorbikes, soggy crotches from wet motorbike riding and some advice on how to annoy your neighbour with your motorbike. There was also a Volvo in a river, a delightful tale about a motorbike on fire and some handy travelers tips on how to smuggle meat out of Botswana.

Until next month, when we meat again.