Last week I was all irritable about these wonks and phonies who are forever bending one’s ear with tales of “the best hamburger in the world”, as if a hamburger were ever anything but a hamburger. As if a ground-meat patty in a bun were ever in some way anecdote-worthy. And I was feeling pretty glad that I had finally dealt with the “burger-twats” in print, and had just filed the piece, dusted my hands together, yelled “Yabadabadoo!” and slid down my pet dinosaur’s neck into the weekend, when the phone rang and a friend’s voice said, “I’ve just been to Maze Grill and had the best steak in London.”

Aaaaaaaaargh!

I had completely forgotten about steak-twats. They’re even worse than burger-twats. They’re always just back from New York or Argentina or Pope’s Eye in Hammersmith and are just desperate to describe the nuttiness, the juice and twang of grass-fed Charolais, the cordite whiff of griddle lines and the rich egginess of the fat, and all I can think is, “You went to a restaurant and ordered steak?”

What did you have for a starter? Toast? A bowl of Frosties? Some wine gums? Who of any substance orders steak in a restaurant? OK, apart from J. R. Ewing. And that was only because the Dallas Cattleman’s Club in 1978 didn’t have anything else.

Steak is the thing that chefs all feel they have to put on the menu because there is a certain kind of punter who will always ask why there isn't a steak on. The kind of punter who doesn’t trust fancy foreign fiddling. The kind who is afraid of food. The kind who eats out only once every ten years and otherwise lives on tinned curry, so thinks it is a treat.

But I honestly don’t think I have ordered a steak in a restaurant in ten years. Steak requires nothing except buying, and a brief introduction to heat – it was the first hot dish and cooking it requires no skill beyond what we were capable of a million years ago, when our knuckles still dragged on the floor, foreplay was a tap with a mammoth bone and the most loquacious men of the day said nothing apart from, “Ug!” Granted, I have met many chefs who would have found such an era intellectually daunting but, come on, surely a steak you can do at home?

Not the steak-twats. They have this dream of anthracitic external blackness and minerality, of coarse saltiness, of a deep, juicy redness revealed when the cut halves of the meat are peeled open and pushed apart; an internal, blushing ripeness, ethereally tender to the touch, yielding a little moisture under pressure, smooth on the tongue, pale in flavour but strong in scent, seeming almost to swell as it enters the mouth…

But it doesn’t exist. Not on a plate. The platonic ideals have become confused. If you seek an ecstasy of sexual union, of blood and sweat and salinity, a commingling of bodies, a communion of souls, a vomitous fulfilment of yearning and sorrow, of light and dark, heat and cool, flesh and bone, firmness and yield, sweetness and bitterness… you’re just not going to get it from slicing a chunk off a cow and heating it over a flame.

And, anyway, cooking steak is just too hit and miss for it to be any sort of benchmark. I, too, dream of a good, big, mature and happy animal, humanely escorted from this mortal grind to a better place, and then hung there for flavour, growing tangier by the day, a thick hand of its rump at room temperature, almost edible as it is, hitting hot coals on either side for a minute or so and then resting, resting, resting… and then gobbled with lots of salt and a glass of claret. I fulfil that dream at home a couple of times a month: same butcher, same farm, same cut, always the same cooking method. And sometimes it’s glorious, and sometimes it’s just OK. But it’s only ever a steak. Never as versatile as pork, or as jolly as lamb, or as soul-enriching as chicken, or as, er, healthy as fish.

But try telling that to Jason Atherton, chef at Michelin-starred Maze, currently the most lauded of all chefs at GordonRamsayGlaxoWellcomeSmithKleinwortBenson&Hedges UK (International) Holdings Corporation Deutsche Group Plc, and now chef at Maze Grill, which is next door to Maze and has a grill.

Or, rather, broiler. Jason brought it over from New York, and I have read so many articles about it now that I have come to think of it as a technological import to rival the moment William Caxton got a load of Gutenberg’s printing press while on holiday in Germany and thought, “Oho, there could be a groat or two in this…”

Basically, it gets very hot. So hot you can dispose of your murdered wife on it in less than a minute. Atherton invited me into the kitchen and made diamonds on it from a handful of gallstones. When it’s really firing, he says, he hopes to kickstart nuclear fusion (the export of these grills to Iran, needless to say, is illegal, although we think the Koreans may have one…).

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