Hanging Out With Hix

Just got back from a gloriously satisfying and marvellously impromptu visit to Mark Hix's new Soho restaurant.

"We'll never get a table," I said to my spontaneous dining partner, "but let’s just walk past and check it out on the off-chance anyway".

We peered past a heavy metal door into the reception and lo and behold there was a table for two with our name on it.

The upstairs dining room looks very much like an old-skool Conran restaurant although a cooler version with a scattering of art deco details and one-off art pieces from London's art fash pack including the likes of Emin and Hirst.

Wooden tables are dotted about, a little too close for intimate chats, and the room is backed by a large bar running the length of the restaurant featuring a back-lit crusteca section complete with seashells. Over on the right, there's a row of booth seating and a semi-private dining room.

Onto the menu: Hix's thing is British dining with a big hearty focus on red meat. This was perfectly evident by the fact that nearly every table of suited and booted guys (and there were a few) had a great hunk of hanger steak hanging off of it.

Being a lady however, the starter of cod's tongue and girolles caught my eye.

"Does cod actually have tongue?" I sheepishly asked the waitress.
"Yes it does."
"They must be rather small then?"
"Well the dish actually contains some cheek glands as well as the actual tongue." Mmm, that's sold it for me. No really, I ordered it.

The cod's tongue was served grilled and breaded mixed with some perfectly chestnut-coloured mushrooms and slices of spring onion. It was a bit too salty for my high blood pressured liking and if I'm honest I couldn't taste any difference in cod tongue to any other parts of cod flesh, but it was tasty all the same.

But the starring starter was my partner's De Beauvoir smoked salmon 'Hix cure'. A generous portion of six slices of the thickest and most tantalizingly-smoky smoked salmon I have ever tasted.

For my main course I had a seasonal salad of roasted squash with pickled walnut and goat's cheese (actually a starter on the menu) and my dining buddy opted for steak, which appeared to go down very well.

After our meal, we popped down to the basement bar for a nightcap. True to the rumours of being London's most sociable restaurateur, Hix was propped up by the bar entertaining friends including Peter Blake whilst sipping on a pink cocktail.

The bar is a funky den of purposely mis-matched furniture, distressed mirrored walls, an embossed tin ceiling and soft, sexy lighting. Shelves of homemade jars of of an alcoholic nature sit happily on the back of the bar, fermenting into tempting liqueurs, mixers and aperitifs.

The cocktail menu is a drinks history novel and thirst quencher all rolled into one, brimming with British berry-infused concoctions and fruit punches. Not surprisingly, the man behind the drinks is Nick Strangeway the fabulous mixologist from Hawksmoor.

Hix: www.hixsoho.co.uk.

Don’t Ask for Dessert at Bocca Di Lupo

I never made it to Bocca di Lupo when it opened in Soho late last year. It's still one of London's most talked about restaurants, most searched for restaurant entries on websites like Time Out, and seems to have been unanimously hailed as the best thing since Italian sliced foccacia by London's food critics.

Needless to say, I have been excited about last night's visit ever since I booked a fortnight ago.

The restaurant was much smaller than I was expecting, with no more than 15 tables in a bright, square dining room topped by a stunning glass panelled circular chandelier and surrounded by peach wall paint. The front section of the restaurant is devoted to a long bar area and downstairs there's a private dining room.

The Good (a mini ramble about watermelon):
The cocktails! I chose a basil and watermelon martini and despite the misleading title (the drink was actually vodka based) this was one of the smoothest tasting wonderfully concocted fruity delights ever to meet my lips. The basil and watermelon were a powerful flavour combination, so perfectly blended that I envisaged a fine figure of a barman poring timelessly over my drink as he measured out the perfect quantities of each ingredient to the exact millimetre, before crushing the watermelon by hand and then sieving the liquid through ice to get it to the optimum temperature.

The Menu:
...is a headache for the indecisive and a treat for any foodie. There are eight sections and every dish is offered as a starter or main. By the side of each option you can read which region of Italy it comes from, or if it's a creation of Bocca di Lupo's chef Jacob Kennedy it is awarded a 'BDL'.

After an hour of discussing our dishes and bugging the waitresses for translations of cotechino (a type of sausage cured on site), orecchiette (pig's ear shaped pasta) and guinciale (bacon made from pig's cheek), we were ready to go in for the kill.

I started with a BDL invention – shaved radish, celeriac and pecorino salad with pomegranates and truffle oil. It was fresh, zingy and bursting with truffle aromas.

Then I settled for a partridge seeing as it's game season and I've been reading and writing about the damn little birds for over a month now. The meat was juicy and rich and tasted great with side portions of wet polenta with Parmesan; borlotti beans with tomato and basil; caponata (summer vegetables in agrodolce with anchovies); and Romanesco broccoli served with parsley and Parmesan. Ahem, not all just for me of course.

Bocca di Lupo is special. The food has that homely, rustic, good-for-the-soul quality to it as well as the notion that time, love, thought and skill has been invested into each dish.

The Bad:
We didn’t order our food until an hour into our 2 hour and 15 minute slot and so sadly when the waitress put the dessert menus on our table she followed by saying we had come to the end of our time slot and didn't actually have time to order.

So, humph, we left without dessert and moved on to Soho's best-kept drinking secret 23 Romilly Street.

Oh well, next time I'll have to book for dolci and drinks only and finish off what I started.

Italian Tapas At Polpo

Last night I took one of my oldest gal pals out to dinner to hear about a crazy trip to Ibiza over a lovely bottle of Montepulciano and cicheti (sharing plates of Italian tapas) at Polpo.

Polpo has just opened on Beak Street, and is the brainchild of Russell Norman, who used to work as operations director for Caprice Holdings, looking after top London restaurants like The Ivy, J Sheekey and Scott's.

Head chef Tom Oldroyd worked at Bocca di Lupo previously, another acclaimed Italian restaurant in Piccadilly, which opened last year.

The mid-18th century townhouse restaurant was heaving when we arrived with people seated at every table, eating at the zinc-topped bar and standing around at the entrance. This all helped to conjure up the rustic Venetian tavern style dining these guys are hoping to create.

We were seated at a row of tables for two running down the left hand side of the restaurant. Trying to get out to nip to the loo if you were on the inside banquette was no easy task and it was all a little too close to your neighbours for my liking.

On the plus side though, it was busy, bustling, and the food was reasonably priced. Our best starters included a delicious Gorgonzola and walnut wrapped in Mortadella (£1.90) and fig, prosciutto and mint served on grilled bread (£1.80) – sweet fruit, with meat and some fresh herb – one of my all time favourite flavour combinations.

Moving on to meats, we chose a dish of tender pork belly which came with a generous amount of crackling alongside radicchio and hazelnuts (£5.50); roast pumpkin, prosciutto and ricotta (£6) was interesting although I would have preferred a little more spice and flavour in the pumpkin; and Bigoli (buckwheat pasta) with anchovies although not to my liking (cold fishy noodles, eugh) was authentically Venetian and the pasta was homemade on site.

Polpo is no fine dining restaurant but nor is it trying to be. It's perfect for a lively dinner with a bunch of mates after interesting tasting and honestly priced food and wine and an easygoing dining experience.

I'm looking forward to returning to sample the other half of the menu!

We skipped dessert and instead jumped into a black cab to get to the official launch of Eight Club in Moorgate. Four floors up in a glass elevator, this private members bar and restaurant has floor to ceiling glass walls all over and 360 degree views of the city from the large outside terrace. The pomegranate cocktails were good but it ain't a patch on the nearby Shoreditch House.

Friday Night in Soho - Yalla Yalla and Jrink

When I close the office door behind me on a Friday evening and burst out on to the streets of central London, the feeling of relief of not having to return to work for a whole 72 hours is always a liberating one.

London is great in late September. The sun is still shining, the air is still warm and the evenings are still light.

I stopped off at Office in Covent Garden and bought a lovely pair of black boots (oops, naughty) before meeting some friends for drinks.

When I asked around the office for a good cocktail bar in Soho someone said try Jrink. It’s at the top of Frith Street near Arbutus. Just £4 for cocktails at happy hour between 5pm and 8pm and it wasn't ridiculously busy like most bars on a Friday night. We knocked back some rasberry Mojiots in quick succession.

The night's mission was all about visiting the new Beirut street cafe Yalla Yalla. Since receiving a glowing write up in the Metro and and similar praise from Charmaine Mok in Time Out, it's been hard to get a table.

Down an alley of sex shops, Yalla Yalla makes for a wholesome contrast. We didn’t realise it was quite so cosy.

There's just a handful of seating, dotted around, in front of a counter laden with baklava, pickled chilli and Lebanese pastries.

If you're after a boozy Friday night, this probably isn’t the place for you, but for a homely lunch or afternoon catch up with a friend or two it's perfect.

Yalla Yalla is snug and inviting and serves up simple but tasty Middle Eastern treats. We had babah ghannouj, hummus and fattoush salad followed by a mixed meat grill and moussaka with rice, and flat bread that lived up to its name wonderfully, eg. very flat!