Sometimes You Just Want a Steak : Pure South

Pure South

2/3 Southgate Ave,

Southbank, Vic

http://www.puresouth.com.au/

One of the things we wondered as we looked at the menus of the many restaurants in Port Douglas, is why do so many of them have heavy wintry dishes on them?  Braised lamb shanks, roast beef with mash and cabbage, heavy pasta cream dishes.  Why all this heavy food when you are in a tropical paradise and it's 27 degrees every day?

After a little thought we came up with some reasons.  27 C may not be cold but it's as cold as they get around there.  So if you want to hold onto your ancestors' British dining habits and indulge in a bit of roast beef and Yorkshire pud, June is a good time to do it.  Another reason is that eating fresh fish and seafood cooked in a light modern pan-Asian tropical style does eventually get monotonous.

Sometimes You Just Want a Steak.

So back in Melbourne we thought about steaks.  Rockpool?  Too easy to get carried away and spend a fortune on something fantastic, and our credit cards were still full of holiday bills.  Plus I haven't yet forgiven them for the 80c chip*.  A steakhouse?  There are any number of places around town where you can get a nice piece of meat mopped with their special grill marinade and char grilled to your liking with a bottle of reasonable red for a reasonable price, and a big bowl of assertive pepper sauce or bordelaise or whatever you like to go with it - places like Squire's Loft, Melbourne Meat & Wine Company, Butchers' Grill.  Most of these are owned by large South African companies from which I draw no conclusion at all.  I do enjoy those places in the right mood but we felt like something a bit gentler.

*A $9 bowl of chips which arrived with 11, count them, 11 chips in it.  You're serving steaks at $50 -$110 and you can't be just a wee bit generous with your chips?

So perhaps a more general restaurant with a strong lean towards steaks in its menu?  Pure South at Southbank specialises in Tasmanian ingredients in what I would call a modern Australian/European style.  They are serious about their steak without either the lockers of primal hanging carcasses on display at Rockpool or the mono-ingredient masculine frenzy of the steakhouses.  Yes, that'll do nicely.

Service-wise it was one of those nights where everything starts off wrong but ends up right.  The staff lost our reservation, but when we strolled up at 7.30 on a Saturday night there was still one table left.  When we asked a staff member about an item on the menu, the response was "I'm the maitre d' and I don't really know about the food" (!?) but he went and found out straight away.  The answer he was given was wrong, but he was willing.  The waiter brought us the wrong table's food, and we were disappointed, but ours was only a minute away, and we were happy again.  The waiter forgot to bring our red wine jus, but when we reminded him he brought it straight away.  My impression was of smooth & professional service that dealt well with a few minor problems.

We were started with a small amuse of a gougere.  It was not the tiny, feather-light, perfectly round & delicately flavoured gougere of Jacques Reymond, it was a big, cream-puff sized, hefty, slightly lumpy-shaped gougere rich with cheese and with a little chew to it.  Every gougere is beautiful, in its own way.

Greenhams grass fed Angus Scotch fillet, 300g $39.9.  "Pure South steaks are char grilled, served with sarladaise potato, soubise, pounded horseradish butter, tarragon Mustard, red wine sauce."

To be picky, that's a potato croquette, not sarladaise.  But so what?  It was a good croquette, and I don't know anyone who orders a steak for the sake of the pommes sarladaise.  The steak was precisely to medium rare as ordered, tasty and had that good Scotch fillet texture.  The wide range of different flavourings was good fun.  A little bit of steak with mustard.  Now a little bit with ... horseradish butter.  Now a little bit with .... red wine jus!  Now the mustard again!!!  It was like a game.  I get a bit excited by old fashioned sauces like soubise when they're well executed and appropriately teamed.  I wouldn't have picked a white onion sauce to go with steak but, having been given it, to my tastes it worked.  And don't tell my dietician, but steak and butter go together rather well.

Cape Grim Grass fed Angus eye fillet, 260g $41.9.  And the eye fillet was a splendid piece of meat too and cooked as we ordered too and came with the exact same set of sauces etc.  Good stuff.

Hand cut chips, smoked garlic aioli, $9.5.  The chips do no stick strongly in our memory and the distinction between smoked garlic and unsmoked in this context was a bit beyond my tastebuds.  Our recollection is that they were well flavoured and firm but not particularly crispy.  We certainly ate them all.

And then we went home across the Yarra, our steak-mission accomplished.

We hadn't explored the complexity of the menu at Pure South, or experienced a representative sampling of what they have to offer.  On a night when we wanted more I would have leapt at the pork belly, scallop, apple and morcilla like a lion upon a slow moving and asthmatic gazelle; the pancetta wrapped quail with a scotch quail egg and mustard fruits looks well worth a try.

But Sometimes You Just Want a Steak.

Happy Steaking,

Ecumer