Brasa: a place your date will get a good grilling

This week, Felix returns to Fulham to review Brasa, the restaurant attached to the recently opened Broadway Bar & Grill which we wrote about a few weeks ago. Since our last visit, Brasa has acquired its own sign above the door, sending out the “Hello we exist!” message to passers-by, although the word probably hasn’t spread much yet: it was rather quiet on a Friday night when we visited.

Brasa promises a Mediterranean-style sharing experience centered around quality meat (sourced from the UK) which is cooked on an Asador grill imported from the Basque country. If steaks are too boring for your palate, there are specialties such as partridge, pheasant, venison or halibut. Brasa sounds like the perfect place for successful and beautiful young people (like yourself) to catch up on protein and chat with equally successful and beautiful friends. You will be served by friendly and beautiful staff, of course.

Skipping starters, we went straight to the point: meat. My friend Bea ordered a veal chop, and as all the meats at Brasa come pre-cut for sharing, I helped myself to a nice juicy piece. My only criticism about the veal was that it probably came a bit too cooked, considering that my friend asked for it to be rare-ish. My own Galloway fillet was a quality piece of rare-ish fresh meat, but when it’s good meat like this, you can’t go wrong with that. But, excuse my stickler tendencies, I did have beef with it.

It came with a bone. I was puzzled. Is this new? I don’t know about you, but in my little head, fillet stands for boneless

Firstly, it came with a bone. I was puzzled. Is this new? I don’t know about you, but in my little head, fillet stands for boneless. I even called on the dictionary, just so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself, and, indeed, it confirms that fillet stands for “a boneless cut or slice of meat or fish”. Secondly, there just wasn’t enough of that cow on my plate to justify the price tag. This is, after all, Fulham, not Knightsbridge. With these sort of GPS coordinates, one would think that £28 for the meat alone (not including sides) would warrant a Nice Big Piece of Cow. Or maybe it was just too good and I wanted more!

Our meats both came with a dollop of butter on the side, which is not what you usually see with your steak, but I’m with Julie Powell on this one: “Is there anything better than butter? The day there is a meteorite rushing toward Earth and we have thirty days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter.” (In case you forgot, she’s that woman who blogged about her year-long cooking from the Julia Child cookbook; her blog turned into a book, which turned into a movie and now she’s famous and rich. Whereas I’ll just eat butter, write for Felix and die fat, but hey, that’s life.) To balance out the butter-beef cardio combo, we did nominally order salad: grilled fennel – delicious – and tossed green vegetables: green beans, snow peas and brocolli. It was, err ... very green?

For afters, we picked a dessert with possibly the longest name ever: “Cardamom Poached Pumpkin with Smoked Chestnuts, Chocolate Ice Cream and Candid Clementines”. Food writers who get paid by the word will love this one. It worked for me, as I’m a big fan of spices in desserts. The pumpkin was thinly sliced and arranged into a rose, while the rest of the dessert was scattered around on a black board in that modern obssession-with-presentatation style. And just because we’re greedy, we also indulged on the Baked Chocolate Tart with Blackberry Sorbet, which was sweet, warm, melting, flowing, head-spinning ... excuse me, I forgot I was writing about food. Also, I was on my second glass of Pinot Grigio by then.

Some of the other dessert choices on the menu are odd; I know this is London and people have weird tastes, but who orders rice pudding after a steak? More interesting is the Grilled Banana Split with Hackney Honey. Hackney isn’t known for bees peacefully flying over meadows, but among all that council-estate deprivation, there is a teenager called Philip Schilds who keeps bees on his rooftop and sells his honey at markets. Locally sourced ingredients are all the rage now, so well done Brasa!

Brasa 474-476 Fulham Rd, London SW6 1BY. 020 7610 3137 Nearest tube: Fulham Broadway