RAW: Fallow’s favourite steak tartare

Welcome back to Like a Chef, your guide to restaurant cooking at home.

This week we’ll be continuing our RAW series - taking a trip down memory lane to the first time we tried Korean food, and how a YouTube collab lead to one of our most well-loved dishes: Fallow’s steak tartare. We’re answer all your tartare questions: what beef cut to use, how to achieve the perfect dice, and the best dressings and garnishes to level up the whole dish.

Thanks for joining us,

Jack & Will

As many chefs will know, inspiration often strikes in unusual places. Less chefs will relate to finding their culinary epiphany on the set of a YouTube collab.

This was the setting in which the idea of our steak and oyster tartare dish was birthed.

We’d worked with the guys from Korean Englishman (Josh Carrott and Ollie Kendal) once before, so when they reached out to us for another video, it was an easy yes. Little did we know we’d be cooking for the iconic Chef Ahn from Culinary Class Wars and Korean football legend Son Heung-min. The guys wanted us to design a British-Korean fusion menu, taking classic elements from each cuisine to create something new and distinct. When it comes to cooking something like British classics, which Jack and I know so well, we don’t normally get nervous — but cooking Korean food for an elite Korean chef? That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

The Korean food scene was one that Jack and I had really only dipped our toes into. About half a year before cooking for chef Ahn, we had been introduced to Korean barbeque for the first time by Josh and Ollie on the set of another mukbang style video. At the time, we had a venison tartare on the menu which we dressed with a fermented tomato dressing and served with black garlic mayo and spiced potato crisps. Tartare was always something I’d loved for its simplicity, allowing you to get really creative with how you serve it.

Yukhoe — the well-loved variation from Korea — went from an unknown to a favourite in a matter of seconds: delicately beefy tartare, tossed with a punchy gochujang and raw garlic dressing, crunchy, sweet asiatic pear, and a final sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds. A beefy miracle.

Flash forward to a year later, Jack and I were back in our whites at a kitchen island surrounded by bright white lights and cameras. In front of us sat Josh, with Chef Ahn and Son Heung-min. A full circle moment: we presented Josh and the guys with the first dish of the meal — a beef and oyster tartare, served with an oyster emulsion and an egg yolk inside an oyster shell. Beef and oysters might seem like a bizarre concept but we actually found our inspiration in a classic London pie from the Victorian era, back when oysters were cheap and commonly eaten. We took the classic yukhoe steak tartare and made a dressing very close to the traditional, with gochugaru and toasted sesame oil. Punchy and fresh, with a little heat: banging. To garnish, we swapped the asiatic pear for a British conference pear, and added British turnips, kelp (a brown seaweed that grows in the UK) and toasted sesame seeds.

Our ‘Fallow-ified’ tartare went down a treat with our Korean friends (a monumental relief). The big hit? The surprisingly fruitful marriage between beef and oyster. It had this surf and turf vibe that had everyone coming back for more. Jack and I left the set knowing we wanted to reimagine the dish in a restaurant setting.

The Fallow beef tartare was an adaptation of the one we made for Korean Englishmen. The twist came in the form of an oyster mayonnaise, with steamed oysters replacing the egg yolk. The creamy lightness and brineyness of the oyster mayo brought the perfect balance to the intensity of the tartare dressing. Topped with fried crispy shiso leaves, pickled and diced granny smith apple, and dill; it was a winner starter. This time, we couldn’t resist some theatrics and served the whole tartare inside the oyster shell. Whether you knock back your tartare straight from the shell or leave it as a little bowl is up to you.

The menu at Fallow is seasonal and frequently changes, so we had expected that the oyster tartare would be served only for a few months. But its popularity blew us away — we had guests telling us to never take it off the menu. Back in 2025 we entered the Bentley’s Oyster Championship, serving the same tartare and mayo in the shell with an extra oyster on top for good measure, adorned with fresh herbs and kaffir lime oil. We took home the award for England’s ‘Best Dressed’ oyster: another sign that beef and oysters are in now way a combination of the past.

It’s been a year now, and we still serve around 100 portions of this beef tartare every day — even more on the weekends. It’s a beautiful dish, so people sitting at the chef’s counter are constantly leaning over to ask the chef on section what they’re plating, hoping to order the same edible art. Seeing guests use that shiso crisp as a spoon to stir the mayo through the tartare before taking a mouthful - that’s something I get a particular kick out of. A dish that is both playful and sophisticated, with a hell of a lot of flavour — the tartare has unexpectedly turned into a Fallow classic, and this week you can make it at home. We’ve adapted the recipe to give you a home version which is just as tasty but skips the extra investment of oysters. Don’t worry, for Fallow purists, we’ve also provided the OG oyster mayo recipe. Let’s do it.

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