Garufa – Finsbury Park

Argentina is generally considered home to the best steak the world has to offer, so I was hoping that their love of red meat extended to breakfast time.

So I headed to North London to the long and winding Blackstock road which connects Finsbury Park and Highbury. Here you will find loads of small independent restaurants and cafes (a few too many with names linking them to Arsenal football club for my liking!). You have to go quite some way down the road from Finsbury Park to find Garufa an Argentine steakhouse. This is a steakhouse with a breakfast menu - cracking idea.

Exposed brick, Spanish music black and white pictures of Buenos Aires make for a relaxed homely feel. I ordered the ‘Desayuno Garufa’ – scrambled egg, Portobello mushroom, 150g rump steak, Argentine style sausage, grilled tomato, toast and butter. I enjoyed my decent (if not a little dinky) latte, whilst waiting for my big brekkie. Only when it arrived did I realise the waiter hadn’t asked we how I wanted my steak. I cut into the rump to find a perfectly cooked medium-rare steak – these guys know what they are doing, this is the only way to have a rump steak (rare is a schoolboy error with this cut). It was a high quality piece of meat, small but perfectly formed.

Sat in the middle of the plate was a mountain of scrambled egg, soft and moist they were cooked perfectly. The tomato and mushroom (with cheese on top, why not?) were good additions and the curly argentine sausage had great flavour. A beef sausage, with a high meat content, making it less moist than a ‘normal’ sausage, but packed with more beefy flavours.

If I was to have a grip it would be that there was only one very small piece of toast and I could have definitely done with some more. At £11.80 you are paying from a premium breakfast and that it what you get. Quality ingredients cooked extremely well.

The verdict

Steak for breakfast is the future, I have tasted it!

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