The London restaurant serving beef tartare with Irish crisps: ‘You scoop it up with a Tayto directly’

Tucked into a busy corner of Broadgate near Liverpool Street in London, Fitzgerald’s restaurant offers Irish customers an unusual taste of home – a classic beef tartare served with a side of Tayto crisps. “It’s one of our best-selling dishes, actually,” says executive chef at Fitzgerald’s Esteve Prats Grau, who was behind adding Tayto (the northern variety) to the restaurant’s menu. “Well, tartare is a classic, classic dish, you know, so I thought it was a must to have it ... yet tartare is quite a soft dish ... so it needs something crispy and salty,” says Prats Grau. The Barcelona native had used other types of crisps before in canapes but, given that Fitzgerald’s is an Irish-American fusion restaurant, he wanted to try something more authentic for this dish of seasoned raw beef. He had come across the Tayto crisp in London and decided to give them a go.READ MORE“One day I just tried them. I bought the Taytos. I did the dish, and it was perfect,” he says.“They are crispy. They are super salty, and when you eat them with the tartare it makes an explosion of flavours in the mouth.”The Tayto, made in Tandragee, Co Armagh, have another function in Prats Grau’s dish too – the tartare is not served with a knife and fork but rather customers are advised to “just scoop it up with a Tayto directly”. “It’s not messy, but it’s playful, you know?” says Prats Grau, adding that the dish is great for sharing. “You put it in the middle of the table, everybody grabs their Taytos and eats it as it comes.”Esteve Prats Grau, executive chef at Fitzgerald’s restaurant in London Fitzgerald’s, which alongside The Horsemen pub forms an Irish-American clubhouse, has only been open since April but Prats Grau says he has already noticed the surprised reactions of Irish customers coming to the restaurant and seeing that Tayto is being served. The beef tartare dish is a starter at the restaurant and is priced at £15.50 (€18).“People are surprised, they cannot believe they will find it here in London. They’re like, ‘Wow, it’s from our country’,” he says. [ You’re taking the crisp, right? How Tayto in the North are different from Tayto in the SouthOpens in new window ]But what about the key question in the age-old debate? Why did the chef choose northern Tayto over southern Tayto? Prats Grau insists that his decision was made on pragmatic grounds, “mainly because of the suppliers”. It’s “not that easy” to source Tayto from the Republic, he says.The chef, who has a background in Michelin-starred restaurants, reckons kitchens sometimes “overthink” their dishes.“They over-touch them, they try to go crazy – in this restaurant we did the opposite,” he says.