Hawksmoor Wood Wharf R E S TA U R A N T R E V I E W :
Too big to fail?
Y
ou’ve got to have balls the size of a grain-fed, hormonepumped steer’s to open a big-ticket steak restaurant in a period of economic downturn. All restaurants feed off a strong economy. But given that they’re disproportionately propped up by men who wear chinos and gilets to bet on line graphs all day – it’s a trope but it’s true; the bit about steak restaurants being sausage fests, but also about the chinos and gilets – swanky steak restaurants, more than any other type of swanky restaurants (swanky Brazilian-Peruvian-Japanese mash-ups, for example) rely on a FTSE 100 in bullish spirits (see what I did there?). It’s true. We can draw our own line graph
and you’ll see what I mean... The story of the swanky (modern) steakhouse begins with Hawksmoor and Goodman. The principal names in premium beef (still) opened in 2006 and 2008, respectively, following a five-year period in which the FTSE 100 was going gangbusters. The index, after recovering from the burst of the dotcom bubble (2000-2002), was up every year between 2003 and 2008. Would that be peppercorn or béarnaise sauce with your sirloin, Sir? For several years, the friendly rivals forged a reputation as the best steakhouses in town before... WALLOP. Lehman Brothers. Economic crisis. Bailouts. Quantitative easing. No more venture capital. No more lending. No
Words:
Richard Brown
more swanky steak restaurants... For a while... By 2012, we’re back on our feet. The City’s up. The Olympics is in town. Consumer confidence is growing (albeit slowly). Cue the opening of the first admittedly-less-swanky Flat Iron in Shoreditch, followed, in 2014, by three properly-swanky meat dens: hypermasculine Beast (from the same team as Goodman); new City ‘It’ restaurant M (from the former managing director of Gaucho); and pumping, party beef bunker STK (straight outta Midtown Manhattan). By which point you’d have thought that London would have had its fill of steak places. Not quite. In 2015, New York
