The new reality is best served rare

John Mitchinson launches his restaurant column with the finest steak of his life at a recession-busting price

Woody Allen once wrote about a character who ‘hated reality but realised it was still the only place to get a good steak.’ Well, reality is back on the menu for most of us. We’re buffeted daily by stories in which the chill wind of realism whips through the hospitality sector: hotel bookings are down 40 per cent, the one-in-five failure rate for new restaurants is set to double, and even the foreign chefs are going home because the euro in their pocket is suddenly worth something. If we’re going to eat out at all, it had better be sinew-stiffening, unpretentious, properly nourishing fare. It had better be steak.

Steak is, famously, what we Brits like to dine out on most. Even as you read this, thousands of medium-rare sirloins will be flopping onto plates all over the land. But I want you to forget them. I want you to picture a new reality – a steak which combines toothsomeness of texture with a depth of flavour that would persuade even the most committed veggie to rejoin the herd. I want you to imagine it served, not à la Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, with industrially extruded béarnaise, but with a rich, crunchy condiment made from baked bone marrow. Then I want you to imagine paying less than £15 for it.

Like all good new things, the Hix Oyster and Chop House is really a new take on an old thing. The London chop house was a 19th century institution which grew to serve the nutritional needs of clerks pouring into the rapidly expanding City. They specialised in serving large portions quickly, keeping the stomachs of their relatively humble clientele sated without overcharging them. Given the upscale pedigree of the chef-patron Mark Hix (he ran the kitchens at the Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey), you might not expect cheap-and-cheerful, but his chop house feels comfortably old-fashioned – it was once a sausage factory and then a rather splendid fish restaurant called Rudland and Stubbs – and its clean wooden floor and panelled walls are honest and functional, as befits a Smithfield institution. It was here, in the presence of an American, that I ate the best steak of my life for £14.90.

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