We'll meat again

YOU only need to glance at a restaurant guide from the 1960s to appreciate how steak and chips was once the very definition of fine living.

To those of us who today take a perverse delight in peering through the smeary windows of London's Aberdeen and Angus Steakhouse chains wondering who on earth eats there, it may come as a shock that The Good Food Guide once included both of them - and the long- forgotten Berni Inns.

The descent of steak and chips has been every bit as dramatic as Satan's fall from Heaven. High on fat, high on angst about BSE and foot-andmouth, but about as low as it's possible to get on trendiness, it's almost impossible to believe that the combination still exists in the era of juice bars and organic supermarkets.

That's why Berni Inns have quietly disappeared, while on a bustling Friday lunchtime a few weeks ago, Aberdeen's big branch at the corner of St Martin's Lane and Cranbourne Street contained not a single person other than a few bored waiters standing arms crossed, surrounded by untouched Black Forest Gateaux.

Which is a shame, because steak and chips is really a very nice dish indeed.

But there are signs at last that, as part of beef 's general revival, this classic of classics is making a long-overdue comeback.

For one thing, foodie people are becoming unafraid to admit that they like it. Antony Worrall Thompson says he is planning soon to open a steak restaurant, Notting Grill.

And next month sees the opening of what must be the first new, British beef-only steak restaurant in decades.

Sophie's Steakhouse and Bar, on the Fulham Road, is a direct assault on the hearts and wallets of smart Londoners bored with pretending they like twiddly bits of colourful food served in those twee "towers" in the middle of your plate.

Inspired by steak houses in Chicago and New York, the food will be hulking, organically reared Scottish and Northern Irish steaks, aged for a month and accompanied by big, fat, freshly-made, non-frozen chips.

Almost as tasty as that sounds are the catering credentials of the steakhouse's eponymous proprietor: Sophie Mogford, 27, daughter of Jeremy Mogford who founded the once revolutionary Browns restaurant chain and sold it for pounds 35 million.

Oddly, however, it is not Sophie who always wanted to go into restaurants, but her business partner and kindergarten friend from their childhood in Oxford, Rupert Power.

While Sophie went from St Mary's, an academy for intelligently wayward girls in Ascot, to Newcastle University with a view to becoming a social worker, Rupert (Tourism and Catering at Oxford Brookes) has wanted to be a restaurateur since he was a tot.

A couple of things, however, led to them opening Sophie's Steakhouse together. One was a holiday in the States last year which took them to Peter Luger, a steakhouse in Brooklyn, which left them awestruck and was to be the template for their new business.

Another was a near obsession with how the Aberdeen Steakhouses in London contrive to make a living when you never seem to see a soul in one.

So fascinated are the pair by this eternal London conundrum, that they play it as a kind of parlour game, advancing increasingly ludicrous explanations.

As an ironic tribute to the poor old Aberdeen, they are installing as part of the pounds 300,000 fit-out of their premises, red leather banquette seating not unlike the Aberdeens'.

The similarities will end there, however, as Sophie and Rupert would rather like themselves not to become the subject of an ironic customer spotting game. They are, indeed, far from dilettantes, and their preparations for opening Sophie's Steakhouse smack more of a real calling.

RUPERT began by washing up in Sophie's dad's restaurants, then waiting there, then waiting at Quaglino's, ending up last year as head waiter for three years. Sophie worked for Smolensky's in The Strand, set up a City wine bar, and then, to learn about the steak trade, waitressed at the Gaucho Grill.

As for turning into a brand themselves, for the moment, Sophie and Rupert plan to be proprietors in residence, although they can't quite deny ambitions of meaty global domination. Post BSE, they say, there's certainly no shortage of the right kind of acquiescent, organic beef.

And there's just one worrying sign that Sophie's Steakhouse might one day be a chain as ubiquitous, if not as grim, as the Aberdeen.

"OK, confession time," she said as I pressed her on the possibility, not impossible considering what her dad has achieved, of her ultimately taking the whole thing over.

"When I was 10 someone gave me 10 shares in Aberdeen Steakhouses - and I've still got them. So it's true; we've already got a stake in the enemy camp."

Copyright 2002
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