This is still my stuff.

I took it out of the ’fridge early, rubbed on some oil and black pepper, and left it to breathe for a while. The plan was to make the best approximation I could of Jack O’Shea’s advice by giving this cross-cut onglet about 90 seconds on each side, as close as I could get it to as high as the grill would go, and then letting it rest for a good five or six minutes. It wasn’t the thickest slice I’ve seen, so I was a little concerned about over-cooking it; as it turned out, had I been in more squeamish a mood today, it probably could even have borne another 30 seconds each side, but the result was perfect for my currently vampiric mien, and the flavour - obviously largely due to the careful maturing at the ’Pig, though enhanced, I do believe, by Mr. O'Shea's tips - was quite extraordinary: a deep, broad beef, smooth and round, with a tangy edge of offal iron. This cut’ll get nowt but praise from me.

One of my leaving presents from POKE was a huge bag of extremely good steak. Fillet, ribeye, T-bone, sirloin, and one of the biggest rump steaks I've seen, matured for 45 days. Not content with that, amongst other things (including a monster Friday night out) they also very generously indulged me with the gift of a day's beef butchery course at the Ginger Pig in Victoria Park. To say I'm eagerly awaiting it doesn't really begin to encapsulate my feelings about it - mild trepidation mixed with delight and excitement would go some of the way. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy these pre-cut steaks enormously. Thanks, Pokers!

Tonight, not only did we grind our gnashers' way through 5 different cuts of impressively varied beef steak - from carpaccio of Aberdeen Angus fillet, through sirloin of grass-fed Hereford and rib-eye of grain-fed Casterbridge beef, to New York strip steak cut from 35-day Creekstone corn-fed U.S.D.A. prime - but: we ate 9th-grade Wagyu beef rump (top right) at the Maze Grill.

The Wagyu producers in Japan only export up to 5th-grade product, keeping the higher grades back for inland consumption by the local connoisseurs, and so the rump we had was Australian, its origin and California being apparently the two only other sources of such high grades.

I grant you, I've not yet been to Japan, nor tried even low-grade Japanese Wagyu beef outside it, but frankly, if the Australian stuff is as good as this, served as deliciously broiled as this in one of the top meat restaurants in London, and I get to have a taste, then my nose is staying fairly resolutely in joint.

This was remarkable food. It's quite an endorsement of the meal as a whole if all 11 attending Meat Club members (out of a planned 12 - you know who you are, vegetarian) gladly cherish every drop even of the pudding. Jason Atherton, you and your excellent staff deserve every one of your plaudits. Thank you for treating us to this feast.

Saw this new place a couple of weeks ago, walking past on the way home from the Easton, near Exmouth Market, and having just enjoyed a good meal there, felt inspired to check this out at the next opportunity. Unfortunately, it was quite a let-down. For a start, the pace was extremely rushed, to the point where I had to tell the waiter that we needed a bit of time to digest even slightly before choosing a pudding. Secondly, though my starter of ham hock with jalapeños and nuts was good, the rest of the food really just wasn’t up to much. The steak was fine, but if you can buy in decent meat, which they obviously had, then you really ought not to be running a restaurant if you can’t serve it decently; the roasted cassava chips accompanying it were a tasteless waste of space; the cheesecake was too cold and hence also fairly tasteless, insufficiently crunchy for something advertised as containing hazelnuts, and generally uninspiring. A decent Malbec went well with the steak, perking things up a little, but the pudding wine which the waiter recommended to go with the cheesecake (out of a choice of only two served by the glass from the seven or eight on the menu) was too sharp, mismatched with what taste I could elicit from the pudding itself, and so merely constituted yet another disappointment. In summary: great location, nice décor, could be good, but seriously, don’t bother until they’ve had a few critical slatings and consequently got their act together.

I very rarely order liver in restaurants because frankly it’s just so easy to fuck up. However having eaten some extremely good steak at Unico in Epping before, it struck me during today’s visit that their chef might well know if not his actual onions then at least his offal. While it certainly could have been a little rarer, it certainly wasn’t ruined, and the choice of cure on the bacon, though I don’t know what it was, complemented the strong liver flavour very nicely. In summary: not bad.

There was a seriously cadaverous feel to this onglet I had from the usual place last week. Something about the texture, the sinewy, raw viscerality of it, spoke to me of torture, death and decay. Bloody tasty, though.

I know I’m always going on about meat, but, well, that’s because it’s so great. When it’s good, that is — and when you buy it from the Ginger Pig’s new Hackney branch, that’s exactly what it is.

The shop itself is nicely understated; no airs and graces, just a clean, fresh, white room with lots of light, a blond wood floor and, by way of an entirely natural, unassuming, and gently confident assertion of pedigree, a glass door through to the meat store. The huge variety of wares on display is beautifully presented and incredibly tempting; when the lady serving me and I had sorted out our bacon business and she asked if there was anything else I wanted, I had to restrain myself from embarking on a pork–belly and fore–rib spree.

Instead I contented myself with this prime fillet steak, by comparison with other purveyors of meat hardly a snip at around £8, but boy, was it worth it. I wouldn’t have expected myself to describe a fillet as “buttery”, but that’s what it was, in texture and even in taste; the blandness to whose acceptance we’ve become inured in seeking tenderness elsewhere was replaced by a soft, round and, yes, buttery flavour in the front of the mouth, reinforced on further rumination by a big, broad beef bouquet of the type one normally associates with a large joint.

Fantastic stuff, but I couldn’t help but be a little saddened by the thought that this is really what we should get everywhere. Without wanting to take anything whatsoever away from the Ginger Pig’s wonderful produce or principles, it’s a sad indictment of the current state of affairs that this should stand so far ahead of the rest of the processed, packaged, sanitized dross that we as a society have learned to expect, simply by virtue of practicing the sort of artisan husbandry that can only derive from a passion for providing the very best.

I’ve recently been trying to buy more food from small local shops. The menu thus obtained has until recently consisted most notably of vegetables, chilis and the like, as there are a couple of independent everything-sellers near enough to where I live; not having a butcher in the same local strip, I’d been leaving the supply of meat to Sainsbury’s.

Last week, in a fit of vague dissatisfaction with the quality, taste and price of said supply, I walked straight past the entrance to the Kingsland shopping centre in whose bowels the supermarket lurks, and straight into a halal butcher a few paces further along the road, where I bought 2 huge fillets of halal chicken for the princely sum of £1.75.

On converting this poultry acquisition into an extremely hot Thai red curry with the addition of the biggest Scotch bonnet I could find (my current culinary flame), I discovered, to my mild surprise, that the chicken was by my reckonings at least ten times better than that sold under the “Taste the difference” or “Organic” marques in Lord Sainsbury’s automated emporium. Not only much more tender, but tastier, and if I could tell that even through the swathes of spice, I mused, perhaps I was onto something.

So yesterday I went back and bought half a kilo of beef mince (again £1.75) and this steak, the latter priced at £3.19. You can't really get a decent sense of scale from the photo, but to give some idea, those who know me will know that I like a decent-sized steak, and even after cutting this one in two, it was still almost too much. (Obviously I wasn’t going to let a simple piece of cow beat me, but you get the picture.)

It wasn't the best steak I’ve eaten (though to be fair, it’s up against some stiff competition), and it wasn’t as significantly better than its supermarket counterpart as last week’s chicken - but it was very good, and it cost around a third of the price of my previous supplier's (see how easy that was?) equivalent wares. The mince is currently stewing in a slow chili con carne, so I don’t yet know how well that compares, but preliminary tastings seem good, even if the recipe was probably originally devised to cover up the shortcomings of less-than-perfect meat.

So, given that the motivation behind trying out this new meat channel was in large part to get away from the pre-packaged, plasticised, depersonalised and conveyor-belted “produce” purveyed by the Tescos and the Sainsbury’s and the Waitroses of the world, and that it incorporated an admittedly slightly uncertainly-targeted but nonetheless present and intended nod towards better provenance and husbandry, am I, in buying halal meat, whose actual level cruelty in preparation I’ve been unable realistically to ascertain from writings on Internet (SHOCK), merely rubbing my own snout further in a mire of hypocrisy? In addition, does the method of slaughter actually have any beneficial effect on the taste, or was the improved quality merely down to less mechanically or factory-farmed animals used by this particular butcher?

Fucked if I know.

It’s about 2 years since I’ve partaken of this traditional Serbian dish. Though I’ve happily added the experience to my ever-growing collection of gustatory anecdotes, the unfamiliarity of the circumstances in which I found myself at the time of that first indulgence meant that my memories of the actual dish and its eating are now hazy at best, so I was pleased to be able to give it another bash last Saturday night.

The apparently equally traditional highlight of my meal at the relatively recently-opened Елемент (Element) restaurant a few short streets away from Trg Republike (Republic Square) in Beograd — a beef steak stuffed with thick smoked bacon and strong yellow Serbian cheese — safely out of the way and the subsequent myocardial episode booked in at the city hospital, this delicacy was brought with minimal ceremony to the table and despite my already significantly distended belly, I made sure to take a sample. Purely for research purposes, you understand.

As far as I can tell, the good bits of the calf’s head (presumably mainly the cheeks) are stripped off and fried up with some onions, at which point vegetables and various herbs and spices are added, and the whole thing is left to reduce down, leaving behind after some unspecified length of time a casserole of medium to light consistency.

The overall impression was surprisingly subtle, certainly not as overpowering as offal-avoiders may fear, and the onion seemed to have caramelised somewhat, adding a pleasant, slightly sweet nuance to the overall concoction. The meat itself was tender, as can only reasonably be expected from a casserole, and had kidney-ish textural overtones, though on balance it remained firmly on the “meaty” side of the entrail divide.

In summary: I ate baby cow’s head. It was good.

Black pepper sauce, Chez Gérard Brasserie, Chiswick High Road. You don’t see »onglet« steaks that often in the UK, it’s a cut you find more often in France (though it seems they’re called “hanger” steaks in the USA, because they’re cut from the part of the diaphragm that hangs between the last rib and the loin) - but they’re worth a chew when you do, ’cos they’re very tasty. It’s the marbling, y’see.

The Brasserie isn’t elaborate - don’t get me wrong, I like it; it’s just not in the league of other nearby establishments like La Trompette (and doesn't claim or intend to be) - but it has a good selection of beef on the menu, and the people working there appear pretty reliably to know how to source and cook a very decent bloody steak. This one, with peppercorn sauce and frites, is about 12 of your English quid, which really isn’t bad, considering its tastiness index of 17.6.