There wasn’t much glamour around when I was growing up in 1970s Northern Ireland but small oases of it came in the form of grillrooms. The décor in my favourite – hessian walls, brown linen seating and wall lights that were bricks of amber and blue glass – was Scandi-but-not-quite. I – an enthusiastic consumer of telly that was inappropriate for my years – imagined that most of the diners, knocking back goblets of gin and tonic and sitting smoochily close, were having affairs.

Grillrooms were a portal to another world – and they served steak. A visit was thrilling and if you held your mettle while ordering (steaks were for adults, chicken Maryland was for children) you got a big plate of sirloin – with a good dark crust and glistening fat – chips, puffy onion rings and two perfect rounds of grilled tomato. 

My father, contrary to modern health advice, would say ‘Eat your fat! Why are you not eating the fat? That’s the best bit!’ and roll his eyes. This is how I came to love steak, good steak, grass-fed in Northern Ireland and extensively reared.

Steak’s image has changed a lot since then. In the 1970s it was considered good for you. Red meat’s potential link with cancer was not on most people’s radar and climate change? What’s that? Then in the late 1980s, the British dining scene underwent a revolution. 

Steakhouses were closing as quickly as you could say ‘pasta puttanesca’ and steak was cold-shouldered as we got cosy with all things Italian. The steak renaissance began when restaurants like Hawksmoor – a ‘British steakhouse’ opened by a couple of entrepreneurs who focussed on quality and sourcing – opened in 2006 (they now have eight restaurants in the UK). The number of meat-worshipping chefs – with a genuine desire to cook meat well – exploded and I started taking two buses on a Saturday to buy the kind of steaks I’d grown up eating. 

There are variables when it comes to cooking steak but also some rules. Get the best you can afford and understand the cut you’re buying. Take the meat out of the fridge 30 minutes before you want to cook it and dry it with kitchen paper. Wet meat doesn’t brown well so you end up with a ‘boiled’ beef flavour. 

How to cook the perfect steak 

Put your pan – preferably a cast iron one – on a medium-high heat until you can see it beginning to smoke. Add enough oil or dripping to just coat the base. Season your steak with sea salt and get it into the pan – your steak desire starts when you hear that initial hissing – and press it against the base with a spatula, cooking it for about 90 seconds before you flip it over. (How long you cook it for at this stage depends on the cut and the thickness of the steak – I’ve suggested timings in each recipe). You want to create a good dark crust.  

Once you’ve got that, keep the steak on the move, turning it over constantly (chef Neil Rankin says ‘if you can’t hear a sizzle, flip it’). This keeps the steak moist and stops the outside layers from becoming overcooked. Rest the steak for about 10 minutes (more if it’s large). 

Some chefs do deviate from this. Neil Rankin cooks steaks from the fridge, finishes them in a low oven and doesn’t rest them, for example. He explains this approach in his book Low and Slow (Ebury). It does work, I just don’t always want to put the oven on. 

Do I feel guilty about eating steak? No, I only have it every couple of months, it’s from animals that haven’t been intensively farmed and I buy from butchers I know (even the online ones). ’Eat less meat but better meat,’ is a good mantra. It’s important to disentangle which meat and livestock farming systems are a problem, and which could be part of a solution. Now, where are the steak knives…

Best steak recipes to cook

I hadn’t made this for ages – until recently – and as soon as I tasted it, I was back in the 1970s. This is one of the first ‘grown-up’ meals I learnt to cook (taught by my mum). I just loved the flambéeing. If you’re going to cook, I thought, have some theatre.