I recently spent one and a half days in Brighton to watch some stand-up comedy and to go deep sea fishing while Ms B stayed in London (things you do for the blog, sometimes life’s tough but you bite your teeth and somehow manage to carry on).
I always liked Brighton. It was one of the first places I visited without my family on a two-week language course when I was 13 (back then we did a day trip to London which was the first time I visited the city that has now become my new home town). I love the fact that it’s so diverse, that it has a huge LGBT+ scene (no one parties like these folks), so many great night clubs, bars, cafes and restaurants, heck, and they even threw a beach in on top. Plenty of our London friends commute to London from Brighton and have been doing so for many years, even though they were born in London or elsewhere. The fastest trains take just over 50mins.
However, it had been two or three years since my last visit, so I checked the internet for restaurants. I never rely exclusively on Tripadvisor and never take their recommendations at face value, but its #1 (out of 900 restaurants) spot was also ranked highly by other sources: Baqueano, an Argentinian steak house.
I’m not joking when I’m saying that I could smell their grill from a block away, and what a lovely smell it was… Promises of good things to come. It was very early for dinner, so I was the first guest to arrive. Adriana, chef Jorge’s wife, greeted me friendly and led me to one of the tables. The two and their two children, who are also involved in the restaurant, only arrived in Brighton in 2015. From their cooking, as I would find out, you could guess this immediately: nothing watered down or ‘fusion’, these good people are proper Argentinian baqueanos (according to the restaurant’s website the term refers to a ‘gaucho’ or cowboy who perfectly knows the roads, plains, and mountains; by extension, it applies to any expert in a task).
For several years now I’ve been a serious fan of skirt steak, so the choice was very easy: medium-rare, 45-days wet aged, grass-fed Angus skirt steak (‘entraña’), 340g for a very reasonable £21, served with a mixed salad (alternatively fries) and a selection of 3 salsas: chimichurri with finely chopped herbs, oil and vinegar, putapario with red chilli peppers, black pepper, garlic & onion, and ‘Golf Sauce’ (can’t remember what precisely that one was about).
There are some ambiguities and regional differences regarding the definition of skirt steak. In the U.S. it is sometimes the name given for what some Europeans, including us Brits, refer to with the French term onglet, i.e. the piece of meat that sits next to the cow’s diaphragm, in other words the diaphragm muscle. While both onglet and skirt steak are from the beef plate primal cut, i.e. the lower front part of the animal, below the ribs, the real skirt steak (i.e. what most people mean when they use the term), in my view, is the transversus abdominis muscle or “inside skirt steak”. My skirt steak clearly was one of those and rather different from onglet. If anything, then the term “outside skirt steak” should be used for onglet, not just “skirt steak” (for more background on this check out The Spruce Eats’ post here).
15 minutes later the meal arrived. It was one of the best skirt steaks I’ve eaten in recent years, on par with the best ones we had enjoyed in the Latin restaurants of New York end of last year, perhaps better. The salad was not overly impressive, so next time I’ll opt for fries. With regards to the sauces, I totally fell in love with the salsa chimichurri, so rich and flavoursome with quite a bit of garlic, I believe. The other two sauces were tasty too, but I asked for another scoop of the chimichurri and stuck with it.
Including a large glass of lovely Argentinian red, the bill (service not included) came to £28, money very well spent in my view. 5 out of 5. Next time I’ll take Ms B with me. She hardly ever eats red meat, but she does like a good steak once every blue moon.
For further food-related features feel free to check out our posts about England’s oldest inn, London’s quirkiest pub, fine dining near the North Pole, and our visit to two-starred Lafleur in Frankfurt.
Inspiration for adventure and travel might be included in our articles about our two-day desert trip to the Sahara, our ride in a helicopter over London and a hot air balloon over Winchester, the Sydney coastal walk from Rose Bay to Watsons Bay, or our week in Porto.
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