HIX, Brewer Street, London

I was intrigued to read BooinLondon’s recent blog about HIX on Brewer Street having noticed it a week or so back when going for a drink after work at The Glassblower. HIX opened at the start of October this year on the site of the Aaya which closed sadly before I was able to go. Here’s the Giles Coren article. Apparently Mark Hix chose the site because of its very central location and its recent refurbishments while as Aaya. HIX is the third and most recent of the chef Mark Hix’s restaurants, which include Hix Oyster & Chop House in London’s Smithfield’s Market and also Hix Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis. The head chef at HIX is Kevin Gratton, formerly of Le Caprice.

I arrived during a very busy lunch service although I was able to book the table for 2 about an hour prior to my 13:15 seating for a lunch meeting. The white-ceiling front of house is bustling and noisy and I was lead to our small wooden dining table. We had already been served our own personal sliced mini bloomer and butter and a jug of filtered tap water. The menu read like a British menu with the kind of things I’d like to see in modern British menu – examples including Pollack Fish Fingers on Mushy Peas, Roe deer chop with celeriac mash and sea buckthorn berries, Heaven and earth (a black pudding hors d’oeuvre with apples and potatoes). I knew that I was going to like this place.

We started with the Blythburgh pork crackling with crab apple sauce. This is hardcore stuff and quite the jaw workout. Crunchy is one thing but I can imagine a couple of clientele losing a crown or two over this. I think they needed to keep a bit more of the soft fat to help with flavour but the accompanying crab apple sauce works very well with it.

My first course is an entree of Rabbit and crayfish Stargazy pie. As it turns out a traditional Stargazy pie is a Cornish dish made of baked pilchards, covered with a pastry crust. The pilchards are arranged with their tails toward the centre of the pie and their heads poking up through the crust around the edge, so that they appear to be gazing skyward. In this instance the rabbit has been carefully slow cooked and the crayfish added to give a fantastically rich, sweet flavour. The pie crust is a traditional suet crust pastry (like a great steak and kidney pie) with the heads of two crayfish arranged in the Stargazy fashion. If you’d like to recreate this at home, here is Mark Hix’s BBC food recipe. My only ever so minor grumble is that there were perhaps one or two many little rabbit bones. What is the elegant way to remove them from one’s gob? I had a side of very simply seasoned Purple Sprouting Broccoli.

And so there was pudding… Bramley Apple Pie and Custard. Good old english pudding. A cute round little pie with a creamy light custard that perhaps needed just one more egg yolk for colour but was perfectly sweet. The pie pastry tasted almost like a digestive biscuit. I really enjoyed this.

So, Mark Hix’s signature sees him take British classics and update them with fresh ingredients and modern gourmet-fied recipes. I feel like a bad foodie for having missed an entire season of Great British Menu when it turned out that he won the main course with this very Rabbit and Crayfish Stargazy Pie. He did also win the dessert with a perry jelly and summer fruits with elderflower ice cream. Other things on the menu definitely struck a chord with me including the 65 quid Porterhouse Steak for two, a behemoth 1kg bone in steak that no less than two steaks in one (Sirloin and Ribeye). Also the Roast Wooley Park Farm free range chicken with toasted garlic sauce, supposedly a dish for two to four, although rarely has there been a roast chicken that I haven’t been able to devour wholly by myself. At £50, this could be the best roast chicken I’ve ever eaten, or not. I love my Bresse chickens… I really enjoyed my meal and despite service being a little slow (a 25 minute wait for our main and yes, Jay Rayner, I did complain), I can definitely see myself coming back here with friends…

HIX, 66-70 Brewer Street, London, UK +44 (0)20-7292-3518

I have since been two more times and here are some photos:

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