How many restaurants make a chain? If the number is four, then Hawksmoor, the superb chop-house named for the Baroque architect Nicholas Hawskmoor, has collapsed on a pile of cheques, the dirty girl, and is now officially a chain, embracing the inevitable suck of cash. It has added to its venues at Guildhall, Spitalfields and Seven Dials a vast restaurant on the oddly named Air Street, right on the great curve of Regent Street, in what used to be an Asian fusion tapas bar. (In restaurant terms, this makes it haunted by shrimp and loss.) It is as large as a bingo hall in Streatham, or an ice rink; it echoes, whistles, knocks.
It is a handsome place; the other Hawksmoors are spit-and-sawdust, Wild West-ish cow haunts, so a jump to pretty would be madness. You do not come to Hawksmoor for table linen, or silverware, or women in hats plucked from Fortnum & Mason into puddles of cow blood, while they shriek; you come for meat and too much red wine and offers of sex from South American waiters. It is up a monster staircase, and through an empty bar, past eerie windows like eyes, to a room the shape of a boomerang, with a parquet floor, and stiff green leather booths as fresh as new satchels, and too much scarred dark wood. For some reason I think of John Huston strangling lions for fun, or perhaps a giant’s backgammon board, because this is a bloke’s restaurant with a bloke’s loves, and needs, and unspoken woes.
It waves its expertise at steak. All the cuts, so carefully sourced, remain (fillet, T-bone, chateaubriand, D-rump, rib-eye, porterhouse and the rest) but this Hawksmoor also specialises in fish; that is its pitch, assisted by Mitch Tonks of the Seahorse in Dartmouth, the Observer Food Monthly’s restaurant of the year, and a long blurb on the menu tells us exactly where they buy the fish, and at what time of day, and how cold it was outside when they did, and so on and so forth. We have superb smoked salmon, slender, intense, and shrimps on toast, and then, with a woeful lack of imagination, a pair of rare rib-eyes, slightly oversalted but crusty and sweet, with a pair of fried eggs, always a joy in a proper restaurant, and decent mash, and crispy fries. Homemade ketchup is always a chef’s folly, but they bring us Heinz when we ask, without shouting or producing knives.
So why do I shiver as I look out of the weird windows? Air Street is a 235-cover restaurant in the boneyard of 200-plus-cover restaurants at the eastern fringe of Soho, and it’s £80 a head. Who will eat here? Are there enough carnivores shopping in Regent Street to fill it? When we call, at lunchtime on a Monday in January, it is so empty it aches in the wind. Without the body heat of other diners it feels cold, and although macho Art Deco is fine (even if I like my restaurants Barbie Dream Palace gay with bunting and tight golden trousers) they need to sort out the lighting urgently — a British restaurant cannot survive without good lighting, because we are, on the whole, so terribly ugly. The best tables are booths for eight snarling men who probably work in the finance sector, but they don’t come to these parts (if they shop at Hamleys, as I feel sure they do, they go online) so the best tables are empty, and a few lone groups of tourists huddle together by the wall, probably wishing they had worn mittens and hats, or folded newspapers under their clothes; it is very slightly like eating under Waterloo Bridge.
What a shame! I hope one of London’s finest restaurant brands — now a chain, duh — doesn’t go the way of the haunted fusion Asian tapas, and out the door.
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