Parallel by Pasture, Cardiff: 'Certainly wouldn’t embarrass us on the world stage'
A Welsh adventure with five Brazilians
I’m delighted to report that my community proofreading experiment is currently underway and going very well, and as such we will be publishing part one of a new investigation on Monday at 4pm. Set your watches. To keep us entertained in the meantime, PXandTarts recounts a rather unexpected day out in Cardiff. Enjoy! Meg.
“This is Farah”, said Isabel. “Oh”, we said. “And who is Farah?”
Rewind five minutes, and we’d double parked outside the Hilton in Cardiff having come to meet our friends who had just flown from Brazil to the UK for a sustainability awards ceremony. Yes, really. Isabel was outside puffing away on her tenth cigarette of the morning. Celso was still up in the bedroom, presumably rehearsing his acceptance speech. In his absence we were presented with João, with no more of an explanation than “he’s Brazilian too”, swiftly followed by Cris. And then Erland.
We had meticulously planned a day in Cardiff for two tourists, starting with pastries at Tŷ Melin, followed by a tour of the castle, then various pubs and a slap-up dinner — all of which we more than owed them after being the beneficiaries of their incredible Curitiban hospitality last year.
After more than doubling the group of tourists in our charge, the day inevitably got away from us and so we ditched the bakery visit in favour of 11am pints in Cardiff Castle’s gift shop. But we made it as planned to Parallel, an offshoot of acclaimed steak restaurant Pasture ready for some dinner. Brazilians love meat, Pasture is great — the plan was (almost) flawless.
A promptly ordered beetroot negroni doubled down on the drink’s inherent bitterness to good effect, while a virgin kimchi and tomato was as good as you’re going to get for a bloody Mary without a good glug of vodka. Or, indeed, cachaça. We don’t discriminate when it comes to getting drunk.
A round of beef fat flatbreads were ordered for the table without further glancing down the menu. These were straight from the Erst playbook, if somewhat larger, flatter and less pudgy than the Mancunian version. Thoroughly zebra-striped from the grill, dripping with melted beef fat and with a gentle prickle of chilli to warm and enliven.
Pasture sprung up in Bristol in 2018 when owner Sam Elliott presciently jumped ship from the sinking Jamie Oliver empire, and has since expanded (slowly and sensibly) to include Cardiff and Birmingham. While the main Cardiff branch majors on fire cooking, sharing steaks and irresistibly moreish short rib croquettes, Parallel, right next door, is a smaller, more experimental venue.
To a backdrop of exposed bricks and dimmed pendants we sat perched on orange stools along an L-shaped bar with a prime view of the grill. Maybe not the best for conversation but we managed well given the unexpected additional travellers. And anyway, we’d had the last few hours in Blue Bell and Tiny Rebel to practice our Portuguese, English and Welsh.
Parallel gracefully accommodated the extra three bodies, and the advantage of the inflated group was that we could try near enough everything on the menu. The famous short rib croquettes hadn’t made the journey from the mothership. Instead, a more Welsh-leaning alternative of leek imbued with Caerphilly cheese came two-to-a-plate, leaving us to fight over the lone remainder. Pop the shell and the reward was a gushing ooze of cheesy allium goodness. Splodges of black garlic brought mellow, caramelised umami notes that improve anything from meat to veg to cardboard.
A similar nod to Wales came in the cockles scattered over a grassy tangle of charred asparagus spears and just-wilted leaves of wild garlic, while chicken thigh and prawn toast remedied the fresh-to-deep-fried-thing ratio. The hunks of bird were fried hard, craggy, more crunchy than crisp, losing a little moisture along the way but saved by a downpour of both sticky BBQ sauce — ever so slightly saccharine — and a blue cheese-enriched ranch that could inspire a couple of hundred words from Tim Hayward. The real winner was a prawn mayo, at once murky and sweet, and as creamy as melting ice cream on a hot day. It did a sterling job taking multiple dunks of crustaceaned bread and also worked a treat slathered onto the chicken, or teamed with the asparagus and cockles.
The Brazilians wanted to be sure of at least a decent amount of steak, and having witnessed them at a churrasco, I can testify to the amount of beef they can put away. A monolithic slab of T-bone came well rested, with a thick, salty crust and the pink-red hue of forced rhubarb within. A potent jus only doubled down on the beefiness, leaving all parties defeated much sooner than had been anticipated, like Brazil in any World Cup post 2002.
The pork chop had been basted in a char siu-inspired marinade and sat in a glossy oyster sauce lake, freckled with drops of fat and bicolour sesame seeds. As a nation of pork lovers and inventors of feijoada (don’t tell the Portuguese) this was always going to come under scrutiny from around the table. It got ten thumbs up, though I’d have liked more of the caramelised, five spice-fragranced savour of the Cantonese roast meat.
Over the course of a year of travel in which we befriended Isobel and Celso, we ate plenty of seafood. In Brazil, the best was fried ribs of tambaqi — a hulking river monster dominating the Amazon — found in a market stall on the edge of Manaus. This thoroughly British treatment of hake, plonked in a pool of butter and trickled with teeny brown shrimp, capers and finely diced gherkin, certainly wouldn’t embarrass us on the world stage. The fish had been barbecued to crisp up the skin, while the flesh below flaked away in big, pearlescent chunks.
For a restaurant chain which focuses on meat, ‘the carrot’ seems to have become something of a signature. A gigantic root, easily six inches and with the girth of a rounders bat, took up the majority of the elongated white serving plate. Sliced into thick coins with the same deference as a prime steak, it was fudgy-sweet but with enough bite to keep it from veering into roast dinner territory. A splodge of silky smooth, gently nutty cashew cream below, a scatter shot of crisped chickpeas on top and a zhuzh of zhoug combined to make a meatless dish that apparently they can’t take off the menu — having now tried it I’m not surprised it has initiated the biggest cult following for an orange whopper since MAGA.
Other sides were more Richarlison than Ronaldinho. Rosti fries the colour of autumn straw comprised densely-packed cuboids of shredded potato, though the advertised “dashi” and “chicken” from the menu were shy to the extent of hidden. Similarly, the Caesar dressing on a mixed leaf salad was rather parsimoniously applied; you’d think now Gentleman’s Relish has been cruelly removed from supermarket shelves that this would be a sensible use for surplus anchovies.
In a clever callback to the unexpected star dish, the best of the dessert offerings was a carrot cake laced with sesame, and glazed, as earlier on, in maple syrup. Blanketed in melted Beauvale blue for a classic British cake/cheese vibe, and topped with a flurry of walnuts, it was at once novel and familiar.
We left our international accomplices back at the Hilton, jet-lagged, full and reassured that we weren’t joking when we said British food has improved considerably in the last few decades.
Parallel was an unparalleled success — witty, delicious and surprising. Whether the jet-setting Brazilians won their eco-trophy remains to be seen.
All words by PXandTarts, all photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Parallel by Pasture, 11 High St, Cardiff, CF10 1AW
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This made me miss Cardiff all over again.