Mind to menu: Peter Gordon’s beef pesto

Beef pesto is a dish I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past few years. It’s a dish I created and put on the menu at the original Sugar Club in Wellington in 1987. It was then on the two subsequent Sugar Clubs in Notting Hill (1995) and Soho (1998). When I opened the newest incarnation of The Sugar Club three years ago, on the fifty-third floor of the Sky Tower in Auckland, I put it back on the menu with a sense of trepidation. I wondered if it would stand the test of time. It certainly has. It became our biggest seller and there were many customers who remembered it from those earlier days and said it was exactly the same – which it should be as I’ve really not changed the recipe (apart from using tamari instead of soy sauce, due to an increasing amount of customers with a gluten intolerance).

We hosted a dinner celebrating The Sugar Club at The Providores two years ago and served this as one of the courses and it went down a storm. So we put it on the menu and it soon became our bestselling meat dish. I loved the fact it had a new audience and people began to speak of it as a classic.

I’ve been asked by my chefs many times how I came up with the idea of it, the combination of beef fillet marinated in soy, garlic, vinegar and a little chilli. Why, they asked, then grill it and sit on a warm salad of raw beetroot julienne (raw – really!), steamed Swiss chard and courgettes, tossed with a grain mustard dressing? Then why oh why dollop pesto on top and serve with black olives and a drizzle of jus? It’s a good question and one that possibly won’t make any sense to anyone but me. But I’ll try.

I’d eaten teriyaki chicken at Japanese restaurants and loved the sweet and salty savouriness of the marinade. I’d also had beef done the same way, but hadn’t really enjoyed that as much. I had just returned from a year of backpacking around South East Asia and had fallen in love with chillies and the acidity of lemons or limes. I initially began marinating secondary cuts of beef in lemon zest and juice, lemongrass, garlic, ginger and soy. To be honest it wasn’t that good. Or rather, I thought it was a little complicated.

I then tried using beef fillet which seemed a little wrong, even to me, as I felt the delicacy of the meat was possibly going to be destroyed by the strength of the marinade itself. It still didn’t quite seem right, until one day I decided to swap out the lemon juice and zest as I wanted to have a sourness, but without a hint of lemon flavour. I’d previously used a mixture of rock salt, vinegar and kecap manis (sweet soy sauce from Indonesia and Malaysia) to cure lamb and venison loin, producing a sort of bresaola, and had enjoyed that so I applied some of that thinking to this more liquid marinade and I was really happy with the result. The meat tightened up as moisture was drawn out of it into the vinegary salty mixture. Tamari (and other soy sauces) add umami of course so in some way the meat tasted even meatier. So, that was the protein sorted.