Hawksmoor is the finest steak chain in London, because it lacks pretension and cares about blood. Years ago, at the Guildhall branch in a basement near Old Jewry, I ate the best breakfast of my days: hot bacon chops in a restaurant named in homage to the architect of the English Baroque. This is Dr Johnson’s steak house for populists. Further branches have sprouted in Borough, Knightsbridge, Seven Dials, Manchester and the Isle of Dogs.
This was the West India docks, built with slaver gold on Stepney Marsh. When they closed in 1980, they threw up Canary Wharf, an eerie impersonation of Manhattan, which expressed all the preening blankness of Thatcherism. Still, I love this place: it has the medieval strangeness the West End has lost, and you can still get a boat to Putney.
The restaurant sits on a vast, monumental dock by Water Street. It looks like a pointless boat. London, like the English themselves, has never done river pleasure quite right. The Thames has been a thoroughfare and a sewer for millennia, and it remembers it. Hawksmoor is a long, tall box with exterior grilles and gaudy signage. It looks faintly militarised and primed for action.
This is not English vernacular architecture, which Hawksmoor needs, but something from Dubai or the south of France. Isn’t it always? There are, ludicrously, sun loungers on a deck overlooking One Canada Square. Does anyone sit on them? (I did see a photograph of people milling on the deck, but I think it was AI.) And if they did, would they be drunk enough to drown? And what is the view from the deck? People crying for money?
I would have preferred the Isle of Dogs when it was a repulsive part of Tudor London with watercraft, gibbets and scumbags, but nothing lasts in a great city. Nothing is supposed to. Now this is an uneasy leisure destination for bankers from the towers. You can play miniature golf and ping pong across the way, and stare at terrible, whimsical street art. You can eat blood. The result is oddly thrilling.
This boat is of two storeys, and huge. It is made for boom and may well bust
This boat is of two storeys and huge. It is made for boom and may well bust, but the Isle has been here before. The film 28 Weeks Later designated it a safe zone for survivors of a zombie apocalypse and this still works. Inside, the militarised theme has gone – I would have kept it – and there is yet another French brasserie expanded to the space, though masculine: parquet floors, leather banquettes, brass fittings. It feels familiar and, on Sunday, is filled with Essex day-trippers up for lunch.
The food is dear (a sirloin steak is £42, a rump £27 and roast chicken a crazed £25) and it has, for Hawksmoor, ebbed. There is nothing wrong with it – you get the fat and the volume that the district and the alcohol require – but it feels, for these prices, rushed and under-loved. The plates are badly dressed; the sticky toffee sundae is an immense pile of sugar, tossed together without thought. In all, it lacks conviction. Is this another morbid tale of overexpansion, another restaurant as metaphor?
There is consolation in words. Queenie Watts’s ‘The Isle of Dogs Blues’ is written on the menu: ‘Now when you pass through the Isle of Dogs/ The Isle of Dogs opens gaping jaws/ Kiss it with acetylene/ Caress it with a fire/ And you can make/ All of it yours’. In the floating brasserie, they keep that much reality.
Hawksmoor Wood Wharf, 1 Water St, London E14; tel: 020 3988 0510
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