Steak Slinging Argentinian Chain Gaucho Teases Swank Overhaul in Fitzrovia

Gaucho has a plan, and it’s an open kitchen with a cinema

Gaucho, the stricken steak chain that closed its 22 Cau restaurants in July 2018 before securing its 16 Gaucho restaurants in a buyout, has teased a new menu for its portfolio and a new vibe for its Fitzrovia restaurant on Charlotte Street. The Fitzrovia restaurant, which will reopen 9 December, according to Propel, will switch out the former cowhide chairs for “earthy tones inspired by the Argentinian landscape”; there will be an open kitchen — ooh — and a steak menu that takes Cau’s laudable focus on lesser-seen cuts and repackages it, offering spiral cut sirloin and fillet steaks, a smart Galician T-Bone, and a new four-cut sampler that weighs in at 1.2 kilograms of steak for a round £100. It will offer a new, anything goes BYOB initiative for Mondays, and modish starters — yellowtail tiradito; diver scallops; burrata; ceviche. The Fitzrovia restaurant will also host the clever “Gaucho Film Club,” which screens films and serves dishes from those films as they appear on screen. With the other other 11 restaurants in the portfolio quietly going about business, this is The Big Relaunch — an acid test for former chief executive and current rescuer Martin Williams’s vision of a beefy, profitable future. [Propel]

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