Britain’s Battle of the BEEF!! Dirt Cheap to Top Tier!!

This is a Beef Wellington, and it was beautifully constructed here at Baba Ricard in the city of London. And it costs over $120. Today, I'm on a mission to explore the world of British beef at three different places with three different price tags. Oh my gosh, just absolutely soaking everything with the gravy. And by the end of this video, you'll see the most opulent piece of beef in London that money can buy. It's a long process involving a lot of steps. You need to be a bit skilled to do it. But first, something much more affordable, a classic British meat dish that's been losing popularity for one simple reason. People don't like it anymore, and I'm here to see just how bad or good it really is. Liver and onions. This is one of those foods that's almost like a punchline in the USA, like the food that people don't necessarily want to eat. Is this a young man's dish or is this a classic old dude's food? This is an old dude's food. We've been serving it since the 1970s, and I think the history of it goes back much, much further than that. Ilario runs Bar Bruno, a longstanding establishment that's still serving up the traditional delicacy here in the heart of London. What is it about onions that goes so well with liver? I think it's just a marriage, as they say in food. Onion is quite caramelized, and with the meat flavor, it's really good. To start, the liver is fried on a flat top, seasoned simply with a sprinkle of salt. We typically use lamb's liver because we find that the flavor is a little bit more subtle. The other animal livers are a little bit more poignant. Why are you so polite? You're not going to offend a cow. More gamey. Gamey. More pungent, have an intense smell to them. Next, unsmoked bag bacon is fried to perfection along with the onions. I grew up with this dish, so I enjoy it. Even back then, you're like, mom, what's for dinner tonight? Liver and onions. What's your reaction? I think when I was very young, probably the reaction wasn't so great, but I grew to like it. Just like beer. Exactly. I also didn't like beer when I was six. No, neither did I. But when I was seven, really into it. Joining the dish, a British favorite, mash, also known as mashed potatoes. Finally, the dish is served with a rich gravy and with a drizzle of Worcestershire sauce on top. Now there's so many foods from other people's countries coming. There's Asian food right next to Chinatown. Is it possible that a generation from now, there is no more liver and onions? I think it's a real risk. We've seen liver sales go down quite considerably over the years. We're trying to keep the British cuisine alive, so to speak. So I'm hoping that trying it here, they will acquire a taste for it and we'll be serving it many years to come. Nigel, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. My first question, what's with the flowers? With over 4.5 million followers, Nigel has become prominent in the food section of TikTok by way of brunch. It's just something that my grandma used to do all the time. She used to have this saying, men don't get a lot of flowers, kind of how it started. So your food niche is brunch. Brunch. A brunch where maybe you drink and get drunk. Yes. As you should with most brunches. If there's no cocktail, is it really a brunch, you know? During the 18th and 19th centuries in London, liver and onions became popular among the working class because it was affordable, available and simple. I've had it before, but definitely its popularity was big in the near the late 90s. That's when it kind of like dipped down. What do you think is the reason for that? People discovered other good food? Yeah. Yes. First, I want to try this mash. That's delicious. Well cooked onion. The gravy just brings it all together. All about the gravy. I often say, if you want to know the cuisine of a country, you need to know the history of the country. Even just looking at this plate, you can kind of see where things kind of diverge between Britain and America. At one point, this food became famous in the U.S. as well. So I always found that really interesting and of course, I think you can tell a country by their bacon. Absolutely true. So in our last episode, we covered breakfast. That breakfast happened to include streaky bacon, which is what we call bacon. Here, you have something called back bacon. Now I had to look this up in the dictionary to make sure this was technically bacon. It turns out it is. It is. All right, Londoners, you got me on a technicality this time. Cheers. I like that. It's almost a little bit more hammy to me. And there's certainly no crisp. It's a little bit more chewy. But pork is pork. I love pork. We got a few massive pieces of liver. The time has come. We cannot put it off any longer. This is my first time ever trying this dish. I'm so excited. Cheers. Hmm. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Hmm. This is a dish for a mature gentleman. This is a dish where you fight your instinct to eat something yummy and you eat something that's good for you. I do think the onions pair well with it, but there's nothing magical that happened here. This tastes like liver. And I think it's good when you mix all the elements together. You've got some gravy, some liver, some onion, and then you kind of use the bacon to cleanse the palate here and there. The price of everything here is a giant plate, 10.5 pounds. How do you feel about that price? For central London? Bargain. You're not going to get anything to this degree, a plate this size, something this filling. So reasonable. Definitely. Listen, this is going to be the absolute cheapest thing we eat all day. At our next location, we're going to be trying something called the Sunday roast. Let's do it. From our first location, we're really stepping things up. I'm talking much more variety, more meat, and a much heftier price tag, coming in at nearly $65. But there's a catch. We'll be trying a meal you can only find on Sundays. Sunday roast is a very traditional dish in the UK. It revolves around roasted meats with a huge array of trimmings all the way around the side. A massive feast. But more than that, an opportunity for family and friends to get together on a Sunday, catching Meet Gordon Kerr, the founder of Black Lock Chop House. Put it there. Welcome. Chop houses originated in the UK in the 1600s, and still, they're known for serving hearty traditional British dishes with an emphasis on meat, chops, and steaks. Right now we're here for the Sunday roast. It's something I've never done, and something actually I'd never even heard of until coming here. Sunday roasts go back even farther than chop houses, back to medieval times. Every Sunday after church, it was common for the community to gather together for a meal. For a classic Sunday roast, what is required? You need roasted meats, roast potatoes, and a range of roasted vegetables. And then you definitely need Yorkshire puddings. I cannot get a grip on what pudding is in this country. I had black pudding, which was a sausage, and then the Yorkshire pudding looks like a popover to me. What does pudding mean? Just like a good burger needs the perfect bun, there is no Sunday roast without the Yorkshire pudding, crafted by baking beef drippings together with a chilled batter of eggs, full-fat milk, and flour. Pudding can mean a variety of things here. Pudding can mean dessert, sweet after-the-meal thing. A Yorkshire pudding is a savory pancake raised up, a great vessel for meat, typically for gravy. If you had too many Yorkshire puddings, a great leftover thing the next day would be that some of the leftover roasted meats in a Yorkshire pudding, gravy on top, as a sandwich. That sounds good. Preparing a Sunday roast can be an extensive process, often starting days in advance. But here at Blacklock, they take their meat prep to another level, by aging the meat before it's ever kissed by a single flame. Beef is 55 days aged, we've got pork which is 21 days, and we've got lamb which is 28. When meat is hanging in the aging chambers, we're exceeding the time so guests can experience tender meat on the plate. When Sunday rolls around each week, it's time for the team in this kitchen to get to work bright and early. The aged meat is seasoned simply with salt, then roasted slowly and lowly over an open fire. Large joints of beef, pork, and lamb are placed on racks, using charcoal from English oak below, gently roasting the meat for 4-5 hours. This method allows the meat to develop a delicious bark on the outside, while remaining exceptionally tender and juicy on the inside. We're doing nearly 500 guests over Sunday roast. Wow. Why is it taking so long when I'm not getting anywhere? After the initial roasting of the pork joints, the pork skin is removed and roasted once again in the oven to achieve maximum crispiness, while the pork meat itself is sliced into eatable slabs. The beef is roasted to a rare doneness, so you can still hear the faint echoes of the cow's final moo. Finally, the lamb, a meat option I fear will not appear on a Waffle House menu anytime soon, but for the British, it remains a popular choice, celebrated for its rich flavor and succulent texture. For this restaurant, it has to be ready to go quickly when people order. What is the biggest challenge here in serving a perfect Sunday roast to a huge crowd of people? Logistically, being very organized from early hours of the day. What time did you wake up this morning? 5-ish. Okay, not bad. So you slept in? Yeah, of course. Of course. Being passionate about it. Like you're doing your job, I'm doing my job. We are passionate about it. I'm so full of passion. Our $65 feast begins with layers of roasted cabbage and carrots. Next, the essential Yorkshire pudding, which gets stuffed with roasted potatoes. With even more potatoes on the side. Now for the main event. Beautiful slabs of beef, lamb, and pork are meticulously arranged, forming a meat mountain. Atop that tender protein, some crispy cracklings and a shower of salt. But this Sunday roast is not complete without a generous helping of gravy on the side. It looks crazy, right? This looks insane. It's a mountain. But you know about the Sunday roast? Absolutely. I want to back up a little bit by talking about your story. You were born in a country known as Malawi, and that is in Southeast Africa. But your name is Nigel. Painfully British. Can you explain that story? My dad went to school here as part of an exchange program. He met a guy, and the guy was like the nicest guy ever. That guy was called Nigel. He thought it was a cool thing. So yeah, there's something called the Nigel Festival. Really? It happens once a year because the name started dying out. And if your name is Nigel, you can go and you will get a free pint. You moved here when you were four. How British do you consider yourself? More than I'd like to admit. In that case, what does Sunday roast mean to you? You need two elements for a Sunday roast. First one is nostalgia. The second is hangover. Nice. That's why we have a... I'm working on the hangover right now. I'm getting one. Ooh. Oh, yeah. I think we should try some of this out. I want to start with the cracklings on top. Oh, Lord. It's soaked up all that pork oil, tons of salt on there. It's really good. Do you want to give it like a little dip? Give it a little bit of a dip? Oh. This is going to be a very rich meal. Oh, my gosh. It's absolutely soaking everything with the gravy. There we go. There's pork, there's lamb, and there's beef. I think we should work our way up to the beef. We already had the pork cracklings, but now we can just try this beautifully roasted pork. Oh. Is it... Here we go. No, no. You don't have to eat as much as me. I'm a pig eating a pig right now. Oh, my Lord. The gravy just gives so much life to everything. Shines through. It's the star. Super savory. A wonderfully deep, beefy flavor. Whenever you watch any type of time period piece, one thing that they usually get wrong is the amount of meat. If you're trying to really define British cuisine, it will be based around root vegetables. Carrots, potatoes, cabbage, meat would usually be a luxury. Lamb is something I really admire about the UK, because in the US, we're not even adventurous enough to really eat lamb or sheep or mutton, but here, it's still very commonly eaten. Well-salted, well-seasoned. A little bit gamey in a good way. Some people who are new to lamb, they don't like that kind of funky lamb taste. I love that. It's got personality. Yes. It's got a little bit of oomph. So, for you, you said to eat Sunday roast, it requires a bit of nostalgia. What is the element of nostalgia for you? When you first come to the UK, your first real Sunday roast experience is almost like an indoctrination into British culture. I have friends who just moved to the UK quite recently. They all remember their first Sunday roast. Oh, wow. And that becomes the nostalgia of the element of it. So, do you remember your first? Yes, absolutely. How old were you? Eight years old. It was my neighbor's house. They were Irish, and I felt so accepted into the culture. Well, I'm told that if you're eating this, you also have to have the Yorkshire pudding. Absolutely. Use that as a cut. Put all the meat in the gravy. We grab a big slab of beef, throw that on top. Oh, this is not a mistake. I'm going to throw a little of everything on here. Cheers. I don't think I chewed that enough. I ate that like a snake. That was very satisfying. Everything gets the right amount of salt and flavor after you just douse it with that gravy. This is outstanding. This is my first Sunday roast, and maybe this will be my first bit of nostalgia. Nice. And you'll be the Brit who introduced me to it. That's so special. You're going to carry that forever. Thank you. This was really amazing. Immortalized. Well, you didn't actually cook anything. I know. I was going to share a meal with you, is what I mean. You just kind of showed up. Yeah, I just turned up. Free meal. Cheers. From here, I'm saying goodbye to Nigel and meeting up with Dominique at a restaurant where we'll try London's most expensive beef dish coming in at over $120. Can you actually eat that? It looks amazing. Beef Wellington. It's a food that sounds like it has good credit. It does. Chef JC is the head chef of Bob-Bob Ricard, a fine dining establishment renowned for its classic British and French cuisine. If you had to explain what a Beef Wellington is in simple terms, what is it? It's a beef fillet wrapped in duck shell, then wrapped in puff pastry. If somebody came into your restaurant and asked for a vegan Beef Wellington, no, question over. Historically, this dish was served to the first Duke of Wellington in the 1800s. These days, Beef Wellington is often reserved for special occasions. If you have a birthday, for example, or someone bringing his partner for a date. What about a breakup dinner? It's not possible. Why can't you? It's too nice. You can't. The Beef Wellington ain't exactly something you can easily whip up at home. It's the height of British beef presentation, and any one misstep in the detailed making process could ruin the whole thing. What are the nightmares that you've seen? You don't have to say it was you who did it. Oversearing the beef at the beginning, or wrong chilling time as well. You're going to sear it and chill. If you don't chill it properly, it will start to cook. And then what do you do? Throw it away? We don't throw food. We give it to the staff. Well, that sounds good to me. For this dish, Chef JC uses 21-day aged Angus Scotch beef. Today, we're going to try to make it quite fast, but usually we do that over at least two days. Two days? Because we like to chill the beef and then roll in pastry and leave in the fridge overnight to set. We have two and a half hours. I know. That'll work. Okay. The beef fillet is seasoned simply with salt and pepper before searing. Let's talk about the beef fillet. Sorry. We say fillet in the US. I am a cow. Okay. Point to my fillet. At the back. In the back. There. Oh, so like, do people call that sirloin? For pork, we call that tenderloin. A very lean cut. And there is only two bites each cow. Mmm. Just like the testicles. Indeed. Do you guys have that on the menu here? Definitely not. So now we're going to sear the beef we're going to use for the Wellington. It will give you that color around, a crust, and will keep the moisture inside. Put a generous amount of butter here, garlic, and then a little spring of thyme, okay? This is just to add a little layer of flavor and an even coloring all around. That's it. And then I don't want to push the cooking too much, so I'm just going to pull it away and then it's going to be ready to be chilled. While the beef chills, our chef prepares another crucial component of the dish, the duxelles. It's a French term that refers to a combination of chestnut mushrooms, shallots, and garlic, all sautéed together in vegetable oil and Madeira wine, cooked until the liquid has reduced, then minced to form a paste-like consistency. Next, the beef filet is coated with egg yolk, which acts as an adhesive or food glue for the subsequent layers. On a thin layer of brick pastry, the prepared duxelles is spread out, then wrapped around the beef filet. This assembly is allowed to cool and rest for some time before adding two more layers of pastry. Right now, the step we're going to do, we're going to lay the puff pastry down and we're going to roll inside the puff pastry. Egg wash it lightly, so that will stick our wellington inside, right down the middle, and I'm just going to roll it. Not too tight. I don't want the duxelles inside to spread everywhere, but nicely tight. That's it. Ready to chill a little bit. After chilling, the beef wellington is ready for its final layer of pastry. The outside is first brushed with an egg wash, then wrapped in a lattice pastry, adding an elegant visual flourish. The entire assembly is coated once more with egg yolk to ensure a golden crust upon baking. After baking, the welly is brushed with brown butter to add richness and gloss to the pastry. The whole thing is then allowed to rest for just as long as it was cooked. This meticulous preparation explains why it takes at least two days to perfect this dish. Dominique. Sonny. Thank you for joining me. You're a cook, a cookbook author, entrepreneur. Did I miss anything? A mom of three. If we were on daytime TV, I would say, how do you do it all? Yeah, I don't. There's a lot of laundry. Dominique is the author of two cookbooks and founder of the Wolf's Kitchen, offering a variety of sauces and condiments. What's really special about this place is they have a champagne button. This is living the dream. I need one of these in my house. Yeah, so do I. We're celebrating September. There's no ding. Ah, but if you look up here, we are table 37. The champagne has it all. Okay, the glasses have arrived. It does feel like we're in first class right now. Cheers. That's way better than airplane champagne. They're going to slice it at the station over here on the side, and they're going to deliver it to us. It's not supposed to be hanging around under a hot lamp in the kitchen. The idea is to have the most enjoyable experience possible, which is to have it really fresh. It's gorgeous. Perfectly cooked. You can see where you seared the meat, and then the beautiful gradient going from brown to red. Truffle jus. Yes. Oh, a truffle jus. Oh, only on half. I like it. It looks incredible, and I cannot wait to eat it. Let's try it out. Oh, that is slicing like butter. So you want the beef, and you want the pastry all in one bite, and you've got some of that jus. You soak it up. Cheers. The beef is so perfectly cooked. That was heavenly. Also feels rich, but light at the same time. Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to describe it. It's a paradox. It's so impressive. It's so soft and succulent, juicy. The pastry just has the perfect amount of crisp on it. And the richness of the pastry, but it's only a thin amount of pastry. Really flaky, but almost dissolving on my tongue. Yeah, it's magic, isn't it? All right, you keep talking. I'll keep eating. I'm not letting mine go cold. It's very satisfying, and it's not like it's a dynamic range of flavor. It's not like what if you eat Thai food or something like that, where it's pulling in different directions. It's not a mix of tangy, sweet, sour. It's mostly savory, but it's just done as well as it can be done. This is like fine dining, perfectly executed. All right, I'm just going to finish the whole thing. You are half Thai. You even have a cooking book that reflects a lot of Asian recipes. How different is Asian cooking compared to British cooking? I cook mostly Asian food, I'll be honest, just because I love those flavors. And I think British food is a little bit simpler, perhaps. I just think Britain now is so diverse in terms of what you can get. You know, sushi only came in here about maybe the noughties. Now my kids have been growing up on sushi, so British food has definitely come a long way. I feel like in the past more, perhaps, British food had a stigma of being simple, potentially bland, maybe heavy. Seems like the food itself has evolved over time. I think there is a global sort of fusion happening as well. There's definitely inspiration from other cuisines that are coming in. I mean, I think one of the Britain's most popular dishes is Indian food, the chicken tikka masala, for example. So I think as a nation, I'm not sure it's as clear cut as saying British food anymore. I think it's a complete mix. I think when it comes to British cuisine, I'm still learning about it and I have a lot to learn. What's fun about this is that this is elevated to the maximum, a meticulously curated and crafted dish, and it really doesn't get much better than this. This was amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much. So the batter itself. You're hiding your face a lot. Sorry. Swallow and then say that again. I've got a big piece of fat. Yeah, I did too. So I was like, I panicked and then I swallowed the whole thing and I almost died. Has anyone ever asked you to make a vegan version of liver? Not up until now. You mean right now? Right now. Okay. All right. When you eat a Wellington, you can't break up. It's not possible. Why can't you? It's too nice. You can't. Well, my goal would be for my significant other to be so confused and just taken away by this delicious food that she's not really processing what I'm saying. I'm saying, this is great, isn't it? She's like, absolutely. By the way, it's not you. It's me. We're done. And she goes, fair enough. Takes another bite. Split the bill. Get out of there. She will get out and you will pay. She will not split probably, right? It's a fair point. I mean, you definitely, you don't want to wait around for this dish. It's like a hot lady. You can't just have it waiting around. Don't let her wait. We are table 37 and I anticipate soon champagne will happen. I hope so. It's like being in an airplane. Maybe in economy class. Today we tried meat at three different price points. I had a very affordable liver and onions. I had a very medium price Sunday roast and I had a fairly expensive beef Wellington. My goal was not only to learn about taking in meat in London, but also to choose which meat gave me the most bang for my buck. And the answer is the Sunday roast. Honestly, it was a tough call. The beef Wellington crafted with such skill and precision. But the thing is, it costs about four times the price of the Sunday roast. If you get a Sunday roast for one person with all the food, it's like 26 pounds, slightly more than 30 bucks. That is the meat that gave me the most bang for my buck. I need to stop saying meat and bang together so much. Before we go, I want to say a huge thank you to our two special guests in this video. First of all, Nigel. You can find Nigel on Instagram. Here is his handle. Go follow him and his fun food adventures, making brunch and naughty cocktails. Also, I want to say thank you to Dominique. You can find both of her cookbooks online or in stores. She also has sauces available here in London. Otherwise, that is it for video number two in London, but we have a lot more to go. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Peace. Uh-oh. Now they're famous. Now you're famous. Sorry.