When I’m in a French restaurant, I find it impossible – impossible – not to order steak frites. Sydney’s French menus deliver everything from John Dory in champagne sauce (at Loulou’s new Martin Place bistro) to smoked eel mille-feuille (at Monopole in the CBD). But it doesn’t matter. I want a juicy steak, sliced up and swimming in spicy peppercorn sauce, crashing into a pile of golden, crunchy fries.
And now that 24 York is here – from Hunter St Hospitality (Rockpool, Spice Temple, Sake, The Cut), in the York Street site where The Bavarian used to live – I can enforce my choice on all my friends. Because the restaurant is serving one dish and one dish only: steak frites.
“If you don’t like steak and chips, this isn’t the place for you,” Santi Aristizabal, the group’s culinary director, tells Broadsheet. “It’s an amazing cut, and what we do is so simple: we slice it quite thin, give it a brush with oil and salt, then grill it.”
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The $48 serve stars the very same steak served at Melbourne’s Rockpool Bar & Grill: a 220-gram, grass-fed, MB2+ Black Angus scotch fillet from esteemed Gippsland producer O’Connor.
To get the frites fit for their match, they’re fried in tallow – for “that extra beefiness, that extra crunchiness” – then given a good shake of Murray River salt.
Your first choice arrives with the sauce list. 24 York bucks French tradition, swapping the classic cafe de Paris for a kombu-infused umami butter. There’s also a fiery chimichurri loaded with garlic and herbs, peppercorn sauce and veal jus. Mustards arrive on the house.
A crisp green salad ($8) and small rounds of New York cheesecake ($12) are optional add-ons, and a four-part wine list starts with $12 glasses. Happy hour runs from 4pm till 6pm, with $7 wines, beers and spirits, and $12 Martinis, Negronis and Old Fashioneds. Hide away in a booth, or pick one of the white-clothed tables. Either way, you’ll be in a gently lit space, surrounded by dark timber.
It’s all inspired by Parisian bistro Le Relais de L’entrecote, which has been doing the steak frites-only dance since 1959. Nearly seven decades later, people are still queuing.
24 York
24 York Street, Sydney
Hours:
Daily midday–midnight
Last sitting 9pm Thu to Sat, 9.30pm Sun to Wed
24-york.com.au
@24yorksydney