From the modern art hanging from the ceiling to the traditional food making up the menu, Mark Hix’s second restaurant in the capital follows a best of British theme.

The Venue
Head towards the Regent Street end of Brewer Street and make for the mysterious venue with the immense wooden door – from the outside, HIX looks like a secretive members’ club thanks to the imposing door and large, cloudy windows that prevent anyone from gazing inside. Once through the door, though, the venue is much more welcoming and surprisingly modern. Globe-style lighting hangs from a high ceiling alongside mobiles featuring everything from graffitied bricks to Fray Bentos steak and ale pie tins to gutted robotic fish spinning from a unicycle wheel. Despite the quirky art (the restaurant collaborated with British art favourites Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Tim Noble and Sue Webster) the rest of the venue is decorated in a clean, modern style. A long bar with a few seats at one end lines one wall, whilst tables and booths are spaced evenly throughout the rest of the room – though some are a bit too close together.

Downstairs is a separate bar area, open until 3am, where you can order off the restaurant menu and have a cocktail or two. With its dark colours and Chesterfield sofas, the downstairs area looks much more old fashioned than the ground floor, although modern touches such as metal chairs at the bar keep it from being too traditional.

The Atmosphere
With the ever-present Mark Hix chatting to diners, checking up on the staff and observing the crowd from the bar, HIX feels very much like a restaurant where everyone knows each other – at least by sight. Staff, who seem to know some of the diners as well, probably from Hix Oyster and Chop House in Farringdon, are refreshingly knowledgeable about the menu and for the most part attentive, although if you’re tucked into a corner it’s much harder to catch their eye.

The Food
The menu at HIX is seasonal, with some items changing daily and a good variety of meat and seafood dishes, with a couple of nice looking vegetarian options thrown in as well. The menu is a pleasure to read with the exception of the self-promoting list of cookery books for sale at the end. A restaurant like this is never going to be cheap, but there’s a range of prices and the bill at the end won’t be too surprising. Start things off with pork crackling (£3.95), which is perfect to pick at instead of something like olives and even surpasses the homemade mini loaf of crusty bread. The crisp, slightly salty crackling is presented in one small bowl and paired with another containing tangy, sweet applesauce. Maldon rock oysters (£1.95 each) are displayed nicely on strands of seaweed and come with shallot vinegar and red and green Tabasco sauce. They’re served with the top of the shell prised off, then put back on the oyster, so that you open them like a small, lidded pot. Rabbit with salsify and elderberries on toast (£9.75) is rich and filling, the tender rabbit shredded and mixed with slices of salsify and small, sharp elderberries. Surprisingly, the toast is spread with a thin layer of liver pate, presumably to keep it from being too dry, and the sharp, irony taste is a nice addition to the sweetness of the rabbit and the berries.

Compared to the excellent starters, mains are underwhelming. Red deer chop with curly kale and sea buckthorn berries (£21.50) is cooked rarer than specified but is still strangely tough and nearly impossible to cut, perhaps because it’s so thick. The best part of the dish is the curly kale which tastes extremely moist and almost savoury, with the bright orange sea buckthorn adding tartness – be careful not to spear one with your fork, though, unless you want an orange splatter down your top. Dab with hedgehog mushrooms (£15.25) is cooked well, but overall the dish is pretty bland. As the fish has been pan fried and the mushrooms are delicate in flavour, the overall taste is of butter and it’s crying out for a more distinctive companion to provide in tastes and texture. A watercress, shallot and dandelion salad, tossed in a mustard dressing, is fresh but a few less shallots wouldn’t go amiss.

Dessert, thankfully, makes up for the mains, with an individual apple pie (£6.50), served with either ice cream or custard, the highlight of the whole meal. Whilst the filling is good, a nicely sweet and sour mix of apples and sultanas, the best part is the pastry, which is deliciously soft and rich, almost like the filling has been baked in a sugary biscuit – apparently the secret is that it’s made with cream. A little metal bowl filled with black-flecked vanilla ice cream accompanies the dish, but it’s best to upend the bowl and scoop the ice cream out on top of the pie. The whole thing smells fantastic, so be prepared to share with whoever’s sitting next to you.

The Drink
The wine list is, thankfully, not a huge book – despite the famous name behind the venue, it’s much too casual a place for a massive tome of rare bottles. It’s simply printed out on a sheet of paper, with a variety of choices from around the world, although the emphasis is on France. About half a dozen reds and whites are available by the glass, with a couple of bottles available for under £20 and a couple more approaching the £300 mark, but most seem to hover around the £30 to £50 range. Sparkling wine, Champagne, port and sherry are also on the drinks menu, along with Hix’s Dorset-brewed Oyster Ale and India Pale Ale, plus a multitude of beer and cider. The attention to detail even extends to the soft drinks and water; tap water is served in country style jugs, a different one for every table. From the list of juices, a nicely spiced, refreshing tomato juice is £1.85. Coffees and teas, including a fresh peppermint (£3), are also available.

The Last Word
Mark Hix’s empire is steadily growing in the capital thanks to the popularity of his Farringdon restaurant, and HIX in Soho looks set to be another success. And by and large, it is – just don’t forget the pie.

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