Prime by Pasture, Redcliffe: 'Trying to step into Pasture's shoes and not quite hitting the mark'
Prime represents one of the newest burgers on the block, but can it compete?
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These days, menus are less lists of dishes and more maps of the surrounding countryside, each producer given a full Wikipedia-style entry with their own provenance to boot. Lord Farquaad, a sixteenth-generation 5’4” 46-year-old farmer (Leo rising), hand-dived these Orkney scallops from 13.2 metres down against a slight South-Westerly current in the bay of Newark while wearing a 2025 Finisterre Nieuwland wetsuit and listening to Pearl Jam’s ‘Just Breathe’.
Provenance is everything. If you can’t trace your tomatoes back to the exact sunbeam that kissed them, did you even really eat them?
But it’s imperative that we reconnect people with the origins of their food. Since the advent of supermarkets it has become far too easy to make yourself a Thai curry on a Friday night with ingredients that have been shipped to your ‘local’ Tesco from all four corners of the globe. It’s disastrous for the environment. It’s not particularly good for us, either. So it falls to restaurants, once again, to re-educate the masses and attempt to fix a broken system.
In new Redcliffe burger joint, Prime by Pasture, this job is quite easy. The burgers come from the butchers next door.
But provenance. How did it get there? Pasture, a small group which now incorporates six restaurants across three cities, only buy suckled, native breeds of beef raised ethically and sustainably on grass from farms in the South West. They grow most of their veg on their farm in Long Ashton. The steaks are butchered in-house before service and they only practice whole-animal butchery, which means nothing is wasted.
Without wanting to deliberately paraphrase Sainos, from my experience in Pasture’s original Bristol site, you can certainly taste the difference. I’m slightly less convinced in Prime, but that is largely because my pink and juicy American-style burger (£12) is smothered in house cheese (questionable provenance), ‘forgotten’ onions, beef fat garlic mayo and crispy shallots. Urgh. Talk dirty to me — normal mayo has just been firmly deplatformed.
As for forgotten onions, I love the idea. But truly forgotten onions would be burnt to a crisp and stuck to the bottom of the pan. These onions haven’t been forgotten — they’ve been left to crescendo to sweet caramelised fruition. To constantly stir said alliums would be to helicopter-parent, and that rarely produces a child that can stand up for itself, let alone a good burger.