For a while, I was obsessed with steak served with café de Paris butter, so Shing and I frequented Le Relais de Venise l’Entrecote when we used to live in Soho. If you had to close your eyes and picture what a “French bistro” would look like, this would be the place: waitresses in classic outfits, tables too close to each other, a simple menu with just steak, fries and salads. I loved the sauce so much I took Anais there, too, to dissect their delicious house sauce. After having it, Anais came up with the idea of creating our Taipei butter made with our spiced beef butter as a base.
We wanted to use a cut of beef that was super tender when flash-grilled and had a good marbling of fat running through it. Working with Philip Warren and Son in Cornwall, we picked out the Denver cut, which is an often overlooked cut of beef from the shoulder. The beef is aged for 40 days in a vacuum-packed bag, meaning no moisture can enter but simultaneously the meat is able to breathe. The ageing allows the enzymes in the meat to break down, so that when flash-grilling, the meat is soft and not chewy.
