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London,
David Sexton's rating
Reader rating
Description:
Phone: 02072260070
Open: Mon-Sun 10am-10.30pm
Meat treat: Garufa, complete with sepia images of old Argentina
Until now, Highbury has never had much to offer in the way of restaurants. There's a Stringray café, a tired branch of Iznik, an OK Vietnamese, Au Lac, which lacks the vigour of those places on Kingsland Road ... and that's been about it.
It's partly, perhaps, because there are just so many restaurants touting for your money in Upper Street, a short walk away.
And partly because the nature of all the pubs and many of the shops around here remains dictated by what happens on match days (upheaval, let's call it, politely).
Garufa, though, seems to have broken this hex. At 10 o'clock on Saturday night, after Arsenal had opened their season by thrashing Everton at Goodison Park, it was packed, buzzing with obviously happy eaters, despite being pretty expensive for a neighbourhood joint.
The owner, Alberto Abbate, has a successful track record, having previously opened Buen Ayre in Hackney and Santa Maria del Sur in Battersea.
Garufa, though, is intended to be a full Argentine restaurant rather than just a steakhouse - and it seems far more authentic in spirit than the nightclubby nonsense to be found in the likes of Gaucho.
Yet steaks are what it chiefly serves. The cuisine of Argentina is all about meat.
There, the cows eat pampas grass not factory feed and they live outside, thus not needing to be pumped full of antibiotics.
The beef that results is leaner, with more flavour and fewer calories - and Argentinians eat more beef per capita than any other nation, even the Yanks.
"For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat," comments one savvy food-blogger, in the course of advising on how to enjoy Argentina on two steaks a day.
Don't underdo the first one, he says, on the basis that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later.
"That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night" - and then give you the energy to order the really big one, standing "a good three inches off the plate".
He's not kidding. Garufa doesn't just offer steaks for lunch and dinner. Its "Full Argentine Breakfast" at £9.80 (or £14.80 with a Bloody Mary) is a full English - eggs, mushroom, tomato, sausage, toast - with the addition of a 150g Argentine rump steak.
In the evening, they serve all their steaks - rib-eye, fillet, sirloin, rump - in three sizes, 225g, 300g, or 400g, as it were, big, huge and daft.
Maybe they really do eat like this every day in Argentina.
But more to the point - and the reason for the growing popularity of Argentine places in London - is that it's also the way a lot of men without any interest in Latin America would like to eat - steaks and more steaks, cooked straight, with chips on the side and none of that salad muck anywhere.
In Garufa on Saturday night, there were lots of chunky guys with shaved heads looking like they'd finally found the restaurant at the end of the rainbow. Move over Nando's.
We started with empanadas (£5 for two), feebly choosing chicken and spinach and cheese for the stuffing.
They were crisp, tasty pasties - although it seemed a lot of shortcrust pastry to be downing at the start of a meal, and an odd dish to eat at table, being a food to be held in the hand, outdoors.
Humita nortena (£4.50), a traditional dish from northern Argentina, was a sweetcorn fry-up, with butter, onion and basil in the mix - bland, starchy, more a curiosity than a repeat order.
Average bread was served with a tasty blend of blue cheese and butter.
For mains, we shared the parillada mixta, the smaller mixed grill at £30, shying off the parillada Garufa (£45), which includes all four cuts of steak as well as sausage and black pudding.
The ensemble arrived on a hot plate above a candle and continued gently to cook as we ate.
There were two cuts of steak, rib-eye and rump, both good, cooked rare as requested, served plain with some mild chimichurri - a light sauce of oil, garlic, pepper, parsley and vinegar - on the side.
An Argentine pork sausage was excellent, densely meaty, like a good Italian sausage. They all had a fine barbecued flavour.
More challenging was the lavish serving of cooked provolone cheese, bubbling away on the hot plate - dominating, too, a meaty portobello mushroom and a fat slice of grilled aubergine.
A little cooked cheese goes a long way, don't you find? Especially on top of all that meat.
We couldn't manage and ended up that night pursued in nightmares by rampant fromage. It's hearty, heavy food, this - even without the great-looking chips.
For pudding, we shared one flan casero (£5) - a good homemade crème caramel, served with blobs of that other Argentine favourite, dulce de leche, brilliantly described by that natty blogger as a culinary cry for help - "we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives".
It's the sweetest stuff you're likely to put in your mouth.
The wine list is exclusively Argentine - opening with Norton Malbec at £13.50, with four more reds under £20, and an extensive selection in the mid-20s. Argentine wines obviously suit Argentine cuisine.
I find them overpowering, without subtlety and with a tarry aftertaste, different not just to French wine but to those from cooler climates in Chile and New Zealand.
The room - wooden floor, bare brick walls, sepia pictures of old Argentina - is pleasant, the staff friendly without being phoney.
That puma in Creature Comforts - the one draped over a branch who drawls "I need the fresh meat, you know, we're not, you know, vegetarians, we don't like potatoes, we like meat" - would love this.
The best resty in Highbury? Sure. Not so hard.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I went twice to Garufa and have been disappointed in both occasions. One just for empanadas 2 little empanadas for 5 pounds!! expensive then we had the parrillada mixta for £45 extremely pour and not the best quality in meat.
The service was standard and the owner seem to be more interested in his mobile phone as in his guest.
Do not recommend this place at all. If you want good meat go to the Gaucho or the the local Rodizio in Angel!!
- Daniel, London
This restaurant started off well when it opened a year or so ago and the steaks were great. However, I was in recently and the supposed Sirloin steak I had was chewy and gristlly - very poor. Basically not much meat to eat!
- Terence, Highbury
