Flat Iron, Clare Street: 'Feels more like a Christmas treat for political prisoners in a Siberian gulag'
There's a new steak in town
We’re starting the year off strong with a stellar write-up from Phil. There’s no Veganuary here, we’re straight in with steak and chips…
The urban steakhouse look, from New York to London, goes for dark hues, oak floors and panelling in ideally historic premises. Corn Street is its natural Bristol habitat, the Georgian and Victorian merchant houses nowadays a playground for catering operations mimicking successful trends introduced from London.
For steak restaurants, Hawksmoor, grown out of the City of London into a international luxury chain, is the role model, and The Ox was its first Bristol tribute act. Places like Pasture and Cow & Sow soon followed, all boasting grass-grazed high-welfare British beef from their trusted farmer associates, as opposed to cheap American meat mass-fed with soya from the graveyards of rainforests.
This now standard model combining tastiness and moral rectitude is also espoused by the latest player, Flat Iron, an eighteen-strong chain cloned with venture capital money from a pop-up started a dozen years ago above a pub in Shoreditch. Flat Iron’s additional selling points though are cheapness and simplicity, making for a sort of stripped down, economy-class Hawksmoor for the masses.
If this sounds dismissive, it’s not. Good but inexpensive catering is admirable, and difficult to achieve in these days of rocketing bills and restaurant crises, but you have to remember the immutable law of nature still applies: you get what you pay for.
The place is fine. The long, narrow, elegant building is admired by one architectural writer for “conveying grandeur in only two stories”. But that’s the outside. The interior is less grand, but perfectly pleasant in a cosy trad pub way, with various bars, partitions, banquette niches, brick walls and overhead ducting disguised by dark paint. An obligatory soundtrack was thumping away at really quite restrained volume, probably set by a middle-aged carnivore algorithm.
If and when you finish queuing, service is rapid and attentive, if a touch haphazard. Moments after one server had put my dish in front of me, another wandered past, noticed me, and asked how I was enjoying it. “Shall I talk you though the menu?” was the first question when I sat down. A pretty superfluous offer, since there are no starters, no bread, four steak mains, a few sides and a handful each of cocktails, wines, and beers. Each table has a carafe of water and an enamel mug containing what could be either polystyrene packing chips or popcorn, but since I’m about as keen on popcorn as I am on polystyrene I gave it a wide berth.
In terms of steaks, the offer consists of the less prized cuts nowadays returned to fashion. The standard steak, the flat iron (£15), is a part of the top shoulder once rejected by American butchers as too complicated to bother with. In Britain it’s known as a feather steak, and in France, where it’s usually stewed, as paleron.
I paid a bit extra for the superior Scottish bavette (£18), as the French, and these days lots of British, refer to what is also known as a flank steak, another cut absent from UK restaurants until fifteen years ago. It arrived within minutes on a wooden tray with a ceramic tile inset, accompanied by a fork and mini meat cleaver.
Steak house chains love their gimmicks and slogans and if “a celebration of fire-based cooking” is the motto of Pasture and “a high end indulgence like no other” that of Cow & Sow, Flat Iron’s must surely be “we only got cleavers” which was the response when I asked for a knife to go with my side salad.
Eaten with a spoon and fork, the salad (£3.50) was very acceptable: lettuce, some herbs, and a few pulses including raw peas, a faintly industrial creamy dressing. The steak was also good, decent size and flavour, cooked as ordered.
A very small pot of béarnaise sauce (£1.50 extra) was pretty average, chips were okay (£4), and an additional portion of crispy bone marrow garlic mash (£4.50) ordered purely in the interests of research was actually very good, the garlic element low, but plenty of butter and a tasty scattering of little brown lentil-sized morsels of grilled bone marrow, served hot to the point of piping-ness.
A glass of the house malbec (£8.50 for 175ml, also available by half and full bottle) was thoroughly drinkable. At some point I must do a bit of investigative work on the operations of all these places claiming to have their own vegetable gardens, cattle farms and vineyards, which seems so counter-intuitive to the economics of the retail food business, but it’s certainly better than buying it all from China.
As for desserts, there’s only one, vanilla ice cream, and it’s free, but you have to take it away to eat outside, which might have a hint of the Riviera on a summer evening, but in the current meteorological circumstances feels more like a Christmas treat for political prisoners in a Siberian gulag. Never mind, no problem, a nice strong espresso, all you need after steak and chips. Get real! There are no hot drinks, with or without cleavers.
My conclusion: apart from the few caveats, I’d say Flat Iron does a fairly reasonable job of what it says on the tin. In essence, serving you a plate of steak and chips at a tenner less than all the other meat restaurants.
As cherry on the icing, you can buy a souvenir cleaver to take away, incidentally, if you’re feeling reckless, though wandering round the centre on a Saturday night with a meat cleaver might not be the brightest move unless you want to try being Tasered.
All words and photos by Philip Sweeney, edited by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Flat Iron, 30 Clare Street, BS1 1YH
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