REVIEW: HAWKSMOOR

RESTAURANT REVIEW:

Hawksmoor Wood Wharf

Too big to fail?

Words: Richard Brown

You’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 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

institution Smith & Wollensky arrives in a sprawling, two-floor site behind The Savoy; followed, a year later, by Soho’s slightly-less swanky Zelman Meats, from the founders of Goodman and Beast, who are clearly trying to make hay while the sun... WALLOP.

Brexit. Trump. Slumping property prices (the average one-bedroom flat in London is down 4.5 per cent in 2017 and 8.5 per cent in 2018). Coronavirus. A freefalling FTSE (down 34 per cent in the first six months of 2020). No more venture capital. No more expense accounts. No more fancy steak restaurants.

It’s not a fully-formed hypothesis, I’ll grant you. The point I’m trying to make, in a roundabout way, is that it’s a bit of a punt to open a two-level, 150-cover steak restaurant – with a 120-cover bar below – in a part of town that owes its existence to blokes betting on line graphs at a time when that betting is being done in bedrooms and home offices in Shenfield and Sevenoaks.

Or, in the case of the first new Hawksmoor in four years, which opened just before Christmas in Wood Wharf (that’s Canary Wharf’s glitzy new residential bit), perhaps not as much of a punt as you might think.

Even before the pandemic, Canary Wharf was on a mission to reconfigure its image. You may have seen the television adverts. You may have seen the billboard posters. You may even have received a glossy newspaper – title: Discover Canary Wharf – through your front door (I edited it). Canary Wharf would like you to think it’s not all chinos and gilets. And, actually, it’s not.

I live nearby. Have done for a decade. I shop there. I go to the gym there. It’s where I get my hair cut and where I panic buy my toilet roll. Whether it was the marketing drive, whether it was people stumbling onto the estate during the pandemic, whether it’s London’s gravitational centre gradually shifting east (it’s all three, and other things), people have begun discovering Canary Wharf. It gets mobbed.

Point being, the new Hawksmoor won’t need to rely solely on wolves to avoid becoming a white elephant. It’ll have a steady stream of meat-eaters from the avenues of flats being built along the A13 and around London City Airport and on City Island, and from Essex and Kent and maybe even the Herzog & de Meurondesigned apartments opposite (which I’m told are selling fast, but then the agents that are selling them would say that). Young people who don’t wear chinos and gilets. Who’ll visit with friends who also don’t wear chinos and gilets. OK, so there were plenty of men in shirts and merino zip-neck Charles Tyrwhitt jumpers when we visited, but also lots of couples and several tables of Gen-Zedders, who could be identified as Gen-Zedders because they looked like they’d come straight from taking the bins out.

To the meat and gravy. Is the steak as good as it was? Yes. Will you have forgotten how much it costs to eat at a swanky steak restaurant? Maybe. A starter of three roasted scallops with white port and garlic costs £18, so you tell me (to give the squashy little fellas their due, they were the best scallops we’ve ever had). What else? The bone marrow and onions; get it. Drinks? The Fuller-Fat Old Fashioned. It’s made with bourbon infused with salty brown butter. You can feel the smack of the oily fat against your lips. It’s not new, but it is big and it is clever.

I want to mention the cocktail menu, which is actually a leather-bound book with a cover etched with a map of the River Thames. It’s beautiful and imaginative and must have cost money and taken time and is the sort of thing that makes you realise you’re somewhere special. But inside is gimmicky copywriting and low-res illustrations that look like they’ve been taken off WordArt. How’d that happen?

You may have been to Hawksmoor before. You may have a closer one to you. So, why schlep to this one? Well, for the physical space itself. The restaurant occupies a purpose-built pavilion that floats between skyscrapers (it’s been anchored in place; it doesn’t actually move. In case you had visions of drifting around the docks while you ate). I was sent CGIs of the gargantuan structure a year or so before it was towed up the Thames from its build site in Beckton. Nothing ever looks as good in real life as it does in CGIs. The new Hawksmoor does. It’s actually more impressive. Ask for a table by a window and you get to look out at a set from Blade Runner. If you’ve never been to Canary Wharf, or haven’t had reason to visit for a while, I’m convinced it’ll blow your mind. It does mine. Especially at night.

Back to my hypothesis. It could be a load of cock and bull (wahey) but London will get another expensive wagyu-and-wine cave this spring, when M Restaurants opens its fourth outpost at the foot of Canary Wharf’s diamondtrellised Newfoundland. The FTSE 100 gained 14.3 per cent in 2021, its best year since 2016. A coincidence? Probably. The tenancy was actually agreed six years ago, when the economy was flailing over Brexit and Canary Wharf Group needed a starry F&B tenant for its new built-torent skyscraper.

Anyway, Canary Wharf will get back on its feet. Business will resume. The chinos will return and everyone still loves steak. Which makes Hawksmoor Wood Wharf look like less of a punt and more of a dead cert. It’s not like anything else in the area has ever been too big to fail.

1 Water Street, E14 5GX, thehawksmoor.com