Hawksmoor, London E1

Too well hung?

By John Walsh
Saturday, 12 August 2006

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Nicholas Hawksmoor's spooky Christ Church looms over the vertiginously trendy east London enclave of Spitalfields, home to Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin, Brick Lane and the groovy Spitz Bar. You can't actually see the famous baroque church from the new restaurant that bears its maker's name, but the management is presumably keen that some of its edgy glamour rubs off. In the eastern reaches of Commercial Street, Hawksmoor cuts an anonymous spectacle; I drove past twice, thinking it was an office. Once you're inside, it's easy to appreciate its cool minimalism. The walls are white, the tables bargain-basement wood-veneer, the chairs school-of-Christine-Keeler. Johnny Cash and Dylan are on the CD player. The bar is old-style with exposed brickwork and elderly punchbowls dangling with attendant glassware, circa 1930.

The owners are Will Beckett and Huw Gott, whose groovy Mexican restaurant and tequila bar, Green and Red, was a big success. They have brought Khaled Alarab from kitchen duties at the impressive Petersham Nurseries in Richmond. They've clambered into bed with the best-regarded meat suppliers of the moment, Ginger Pig. Their pork is 100 per cent Tamworth (all contented and happy porkers, they assure diners), and the beef is finest Yorkshire longhorn. With all these ingredients for a perfect restaurant, could anything possibly go wrong?

Some people, of course, will come here just for the cocktails. Between Nick, the general manager, who makes his own syrups and fruit infusions, and Milo the barman, who knocks the things out with gob-smacking speed and rapid-fire lecturettes, the bar would keep any cocktail fan in bliss for hours. Ex-smokers will enjoy the subtle undertaste of the Tobacco Old Fashioned - a hefty slug of Buffalo Trace bourbon from a bottle crammed with tobacco leaves, served with sugar and bitters. (How inspired to offer ageing rocker-Bohemians a blend of whisky and fags in the one glass.) Most cocktails here are American Depression classics, like the dry, pink Scoff Law Cocktail, invented in Harry's Bar in Paris in 1924 and alluding, sarcastically, to the law (it really was called that) that demonised "frequenters of speakeasies"; or the Bloodhound, a souped-up dry martini (gin, sweet and dry vermouth and raspberries) introduced to thunderstruck London tipplers by the Duke of Manchester in 1922.

But we mustn't spend all evening at the bar. The dinner menu was sparse to a Shakerish degree. The night we came, the baby back ribs were off so the choice of starters was limited to salad, salad, prawns or prawns. I tried the popcorn shrimps and got a plateful of small objects shrouded in a bready batter, served with a rémoulade. It was nicely mustard-y, but the shellfish so over-breaded you could hardly detect any marine life inside. My date had the goat's cheese salad with beetroot and watercress, in which the cheese was deliciously creamy but overwhelmed by the purple stuff. (When will people stop trying to bring beetroot back into polite society? That soggy, chilly, over-sweet, over-exuberant flavour should stay in the nursery where it belongs, whatever Mark Hix says - see page 32.)

You could, if desperate, try a po'boy as a starter - a sandwich filled with "skirt" steak or prawns, a snack made popular in New Orleans in 1929 during a streetcar strike - but who'd want a sandwich as a starter? And anyway, you're dying to get to the steak course because, according to Dame Rumour, that's what Hawksmoor is good at.

Dame Rumour is dead right. My rib-eye steak was simply fantastic, a thick, 600g succulent edifice of rare, seared meat, its juices subtly leaking through fibres that have comprehensively broken down after being hung for 28 days. It needed no accompaniment except its own juices, but the super-attentive manager plied us with tomato salsa and insisted we try the house coleslaw. It was, I thought, unpleasantly vinegarish.

My companion's medium-rare rump steak, larger but flatter than my rib-eye, was pronounced mostly wonderful - but two unusual problems reared their heads. One, there was no chance that she'd ever finish it (and neither, I'm shocked to report, could I finish mine) and two, she'd detected, at the edges of her foot-long steak, a distinct pong of corruption, a whiff of blown venison. "There's such a thing as being too well hung," she observed, and I had to ask: is it really wise to hang beef for more than 21 days? Does it make sense to serve every steak on the menu in 600g tranches, when only a starving trencherman could polish one off? I was amazed to find myself, for the first time in my life, asking for a smaller portion.

This hit-and-miss dinner ended with a choice of three sundaes. The cherry version featured vanilla ice cream in a sea of cherry juice with toasted pecan nuts, and very yummy it was (though a brace of digestif sidecars was perhaps a mistake). The wine list is posh and pricey, but the 2003 St Hallett Shiraz (£27) was a rapturous blend of liquorice, caramel and other sweet-department flavours.

I enjoyed Hawksmoor, although it's suffering from Just-Opened Syndrome - its cocktails and meat sourcing are fine, but it needs to re-think exactly what should appear on its plates. Some more interesting starters wouldn't hurt either. And the owners might heed the ancient wisdom that any restaurant offering beetroot and coleslaw on the same menu will be called anathema throughout the land. But I'll be back in a month for another fag-scented bourbon and (I hope) a less unconquerable steak. E

Hawksmoor, 157 Commercial Street, London E1, (020-7247 7392)

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