On 1 July, Flat Iron will open on Commercial Street, Spitalfields and to celebrate, it’ll be inviting guests behind the scenes to a beef tasting evening.
Founded by self-taught butcher Charlie Carroll in 2012, Flat Iron have built a cult following with their unwavering commitment to serving the best possible steak to everyone who walks through their doors.
On 3 July, guests are invited to join in Carroll and expert Head of Beef Fred Smith’s rigorous beef selection process. Each week they taste and grade the best beef they can source from smaller producers around the country, including their own herd in Yorkshire.
Guests will join Carroll and Smith who’ll serve sirloins from a Scottish White Park and then two Yorkshire Dexters, one fully grass fed and one finished on barley. Diners will be given a scorecard to mark on tenderness, juiciness and beefiness in order to decide the evening’s winning steak, alongside all the classic Flat Iron sides.
Carroll said, ‘‘Every Tuesday morning we have a beef tasting in our Covent Garden restaurant. Fred Smith, our Head of Beef, Calum our in-house Master Butcher and I score that week’s deliveries on tenderness, juiciness and flavour. No conferring!
'We work with a wide network of small farmers and butchers (together with our own herd of cattle) to source the beef that is butchered on site at Covent Garden.
'Taking the whole animal and butchering in house gives us total clarity on exact provenance and access to some amazing producers. Over the years this means we’ve spent many hours tasting some of the best beef in the world – it’s a tough job!
'This is part of our effort to make sure we’re always serving beef that is really exceptional, as well as allowing us to gather an intimate understanding of the relationship between different breeds, ages, finishing diets and ultimately flavour” says founder Charlie.
Designed by Macaulay Sinclair, Flat Iron Spitalfields references the traditional Victorian houses in the area. The downstairs ‘scullery’ has a brick inglenook fireplace housing a 1800’s cast iron stove which Charlie found and decided to repurpose. Here, pots of hot toffee sauce will bubble away for Flat Iron’s take on the much loved British classic, sticky toffee pudding.