Sometimes I think luxury is a joke played on the rich by the not-so rich. In my mind, people on the 20p tax rate have a focus group, and design things to sell to the rich, and laugh. And I think this explains sandals with mink T-bars, most watches and now Hix, a restaurant under a hotel in Belgravia. Hix looks like a Travelodge. I do not say that to be mean, or because I can. It occupies a dim half-basement under a hotel. You may not have visited a Travelodge, but I have, and the restaurant is always a half-basement under a hotel, with shouting children and a buffet. So it is exactly like a Travelodge, with the children removed. But it is in Belgravia, where everyone has been removed; the only humans I saw on the way to Hix were the police outside the Syrian embassy, poised to remove yet more people from Belgravia, should they try anything dodgy. These streets are hollowed out, echoing, dead; there is something wrong with them.
Mark Hix is well liked in restaurant world, but the bar is low — it means he has never had a psychotic episode or endorsed a stock cube. He has five well-reviewed restaurants in Soho, Farringdon, Mayfair, Selfridges, and Lyme Regis; this gloomy outpost is the sixth. It feels oddly squeezed into its space, like a woman folding herself into a coffin, and it is watched over by an enormous and terrifying sculpture of a fish. Fish are bad enough in the sea where you do not have to deal with them, but this one is expanded, glossed and deified; the effect is of a tiny fish-worshipping kingdom that serves burgers.
We are in a brown booth, in the company of the English kind of rich, rather than the other, foreign kind.
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