I'd heard enough about Gaucho for long enough to jump at the chance when a visiting friend invited me to try it. We met at the Sloane Square branch of the steakhouse chain for a late dinner which was very enjoyable but more for the company and the occasion than the meal.
Gaucho is a strange place in that it leans towards a number of muddled franchises, without doing any one of them especially well. It's an Argentinean steak house, which conjures up the image of hazy, sun-bleached plains awash with cattle and tender-hearted Latin American farmers serving up tenderloin barbecued beef. Instead it presents itself as a chic luxury brasserie, complete with bullish dining room (no pun intended), too-dim lighting and bustle up to the earholes. There was something unsettling about the cowskin-coated seating that didn't quite feel right with me.
The meal was not inedible, unpleasant or unprofessional. It was unexceptional, life-drainingly forced and too expensive. I don't think Gaucho is a bad restaurant (or chain of restaurants) (and this annoys me too – how do you judge a chain on one visit to one of their outlets? It isn't entirely quantifiable) but equally I can't say I want to go there again. Unless someone's picking up the bill and I can order a huge hunk of filet mignon. (Hang on, that's bife de lomo at Gaucho.)
The gimmick at Gaucho is that they serve premium steak which is brought, raw, to the table beforehand so you can choose your cut and the staff can tell you what to expect from a particular piece of beef. It's kind of fun, but straining to see things in the light as we were, I was content to examine the menu for my choices.
The gimmick itself is pretty naff, like much of the Gaucho experience. It's showiness for the sake of it, which is frustrating because the food isn't bad. I mean, it's not quite as good as their sleeker-than-sleek leather veneer and marked-up prices suggest, but not bad. The steaks are served fairly simply and you can add sides to them. Interestingly, the best dish I tried all evening was their veal Milanese, but at nearly £20, it would've taken more than interesting to impress me.
The steak itself (a piece of sirloin at £21) should've been better than it was, the salad and chips weren't bad, the toffee cheesecake for dessert was too sweet then wrenched into blips of sour unpleasantness by the coffee grit they put in it. They overcomplicated a scallop starter – I didn't know Argentina was big on scallops, and on this showing, they're right not to be – to the point of spiced, dressing-addled distraction.
I think the general word I would use to describe the food at Gaucho would be 'passable'. It's by no means worth what they think it is, but the place was packed at 10pm on a Wednesday, so something's going right for them.
As I have said, I doubt I'll go back to Gaucho. There's something quite off-putting about the ambience, something more off-putting about the prices and nothing that makes it click in to place. I'm afraid that I'd rather pay half the amount of money to eat a late midweek dinner at one of many other places in London; Argentinean steak or not.
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