Hill & Szrok Public House, 8 East Road, London N1 (020 7324 7799). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80-£100
Charles Spence, Oxford University professor of psychology, has written extensively on the way external factors influence our enjoyment of food and drink. Serve a gin and tonic in a heavy bottomed lead-crystal tumbler and it will be thought a better drink than the same served in a plastic cup. A round piece of chocolate will taste softer and creamier than a triangular piece, despite the recipe being exactly the same. And if you play fast music at your dinner guests they will clear their plates more swiftly. Yup, we are that simple and suggestible.
I was thinking about all this while eating at the newly opened Hill & Szrok Public House, just off London’s Old Street roundabout. The original Hill & Szrok is a butcher’s shop in Hackney. By day butcher Tom Richardson Hill, who learned his craft at Allen’s of Mayfair, sells meat with all the de rigueur labels. It’s free range, organic, massaged with aromatherapy oils before slaughter and extinguished to the soothing sounds of “Sailing By”. OK, not the last bit, but the marketing is bloody good. They make their own sausages and cure their own bacon. At the end of the day the central marble slab is cleaned down and becomes a communal table for what, rather cutely, they call their cookshop. Chef Alex Szrok, previously of the Eagle in Farringdon, takes over. Bits of animal are grilled.
I haven’t visited the original in Hackney, but I can well imagine how the externals of this impact positively upon the experience. The tropes of restaurant-going are stripped away. It’s a Hackney version of the Judy Garland and Gene Kelly movie Summer Stock. Let’s put on the show, right here in the barn. With surprisingly high Broadway-esque production values. I’m curious as to how they deal with the daytime smell. One of my first jobs was as a butcher’s boy charged with keeping the shop clean, which involved a bucket with a solution of bleach. That, for me, is the Proustian smell which can take me back there, though to be perfect there has to be an undercurrent of the sweet and foetid you only get with raw meat in advanced stages of controlled putrefaction.
Perhaps they just stoke up the grill and let the rendering meat do the job for them. The point is that the newly refurbished public house has none of that raw butcher’s shop chic, even though they’ve included a glass-walled hanging cabinet containing half a pig, and a long communal marble table. At the front it’s still very much a pub, full of the youthful and bearded of Shoreditch, moustaches moistened in locally brewed frothy ales. The dining room is at the back, with a long open kitchen and, on a Friday night, young glossy-haired couples who look like they’re going to get more sex than me this evening. Damn those young people with their steady hormone levels and their urges and enthusiasms.
They strike me as the perfect audience for this offering, because right now it is something of an entry-level steakhouse. And if that sounds patronising, I can only congratulate you on being clever enough to notice. But I think it stands. Prices are quite substantially lower than at the bigger players in town, but then I’m afraid so is the attention to detail. So a bone-in sirloin works out at £5.50 per 100g – £44 for an 800g piece, some of which is indeed the bone – as against the £7.50 or upwards you can pay elsewhere. But while it’s a great piece of meat, they commit the terrible solecism of not asking us how we would like it cooked and then deliver it very much on the medium side of medium rare. The middle slices are the right shade of pink, but around the edges it has seen enough flame to extinguish any flush.
And while everywhere else in the steak game has a selection of sauces, here it’s a grain mustard mayo and nothing else. As I say, this really wasn’t a bad steak, but they didn’t do right by it. Happily, general pricing is keen. From that night’s menu there’s a pork chop at £8.50, a chicken supreme at £11 and a whole grilled lemon sole at £13. Chips have the striking uniformity of those used by hundreds of other restaurants across the city but have at least been given a good bath in the deep-fat fryer. More striking is half a hispi cabbage roasted over the coals and dressed with the punch of anchovy and chilli. It would be a very good main course in itself.
Starters are a mixed bag. Devilled chicken hearts on toast are a welcome showing for the sort of offal we too often leave to others. They bounce pleasingly between the molars. Sadly the sauce is all wrong. This suggests a devil who has abandoned his pitchfork and gone into retirement. There should be a whack of cayenne, but this has no heat at all, as if the dish is trying not to scare those bright-eyed kids on the corner banquettes. Thick scoops of a soft pig’s liver pâté with toast and crunchy pickled red cabbage are much, much better; ripe, with the offal depth of an organ that has given its all.
As they big up their sausage making, we order three of the chipolatas at a couple of quid, and they are good, meaty and well seasoned. What strikes me, though, is just how sophisticated the premium end of the mass sausage-making business has become. A Tesco’s Finest or Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference (other brands are available) chipolata could give these a run for their money. Then again, had I been eating them inside the butcher’s shop where they had been made, sweated over by fierce chaps determined to create something with the heady artisanal whiff of carcass to fork, the impact would have been so much greater.
There is just one dessert, a sphere of rice pudding, deep fried and served with a scoop of clotted cream mixed with a raspberry coulis, and a fine thing it is, too: a big hit of crisp and soft, cold and hot. You won’t want one of these to yourself. Bring a friend.
The Hill & Szrok Public House is a fun buzzing restaurant, but as the team branches out from its origins they have to recognise they are swimming in deeper waters. They are just another restaurant in a crowded market. Pricing may be competitive, but that will never be a substitute for getting it right.
Jay’s news bites
■ Lunya, now in both Liverpool and Manchester, is another restaurant in a shop, or there’s a shop in a restaurant– either way both are great suppliers of Catalan ingredients. Menus are long, but only because they have to stock everything for the shop. Give them 48 hours’ notice and they’ll even roast you suckling pig.
■ Thanks to Adam Hyman of restaurant industry tip sheet The Code for the heads-up on a forthcoming auction of property from the legendary Parisian restaurant Tour d’Argent, famed for its canard à la presse. Due to a refurbishment they are flogging off 2,700 Riedel wine glasses, plus an actual duck press. The auction is on 9 May (tourdargent.com).
■ Grillstock, the small Bristol-born US barbecue chain which also runs meat- and smoke-obsessed festivals across Britain, is to publish its first book. Grillstock: the BBQ Book, is out on 21 April. It includes recipes from Grillstock friends including Huey Morgan of the Fun Lovin’ Criminals (grillstock.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
