Utter disappointment, Mark Hix, Brewer Street, W1

Never has the parable of The Emperor’s Clothes been more applicable than our experience of Mark Hix flagship restaurant.  Well I say restaurant, it is a restaurant if you look at the dictionary definition which is ‘a place where meals are served to the public’.  Of course this is a definition that is very simplistic and does not have any of the nuances that we imagine in our minds eye for a restaurant to be.  McDonalds is a restaurant, Wetherspoons pubs have restaurants, yet we don’t associate these establishments as being the same as what was alleged to be the new paradigm in cooking/restaurant experience.

This was our first experience of a Hix restaurant, and was our wedding anniversary so an important occasion as far as we were concerned.  We had read lots of reviews and had been given personal recommendations that this was the new Mecca for culinary greatness, is this fact or turning a blind eye to the food as it's the place to be an no one wants to be the first to say something bad?  Mark Hix, the not so new kid on the block having been kept in the shadows in the Richard Caring Empire producing popular dishes to the cognoscenti, is the current hot news.

Our first impressions of the restaurant were moulded by the couple eating each other’s faces by the front door and one of the door hosts in a hat saying ‘yeah be there in a minute’.  We were shown to our table in what we thought was the bar.  No, the bar was downstairs.  This was the restaurant.  We were offered a drink from the bar, my wife ordered a lychee martini.  Now I would have expected this to have been no problem, but fresh lychees they had not.  So it was decided on wine.  We often go for the default, good value, white burgundy, Macon which we duly ordered.  I don’t normally pretentiously try wine but just give the glass a good sniff to check that it’s not corked.  I should have checked this.  The bottle was as at room temperature and was very poor indeed.  How hard can it be, i have tried countless Macons and rarely have i found a bad one, well at last i had.

But things now go from the sublime to the ridiculous.  We ordered, just main courses which in hindsight was a very good call.  I ordered plaice and L ordered brill.  My plaice arrived, skin down on a white plate with no garnish or accoutrement.  It looked very bland, often looks are deceiving but in this case it looked like it tasted – but worse.  This fish must have been frozen; it disintegrated in to a mash.  I called the Maitre D over and showed him the blob of fish i had created by pushing the fish of the bone into what can only be described as a blob of fishy blancmange.  He admitted that this didn’t look right and took it away.  He came back to inform me that Simon, the chef said the fish was fresh and i quote ‘That’s what happens to plaice when you cook it’.  This as you can imagine was the equivalent of lighting the blue touch paper.  I was from that moment on understandably pissed off.  I was presented with another dish, the same as my wife’s which I have to say had no flavour and another disappointment. 

We were offered no apology, no attempt to  placate, in fact I was told by another member of the boy band that waltz around masquerading as Maitre D’s or management, I couldn’t tell, that other people had had this dish and they didn’t think anything was wrong.

This isn’t a credible foodie restaurant in my humble opinion and I am very surprised that a chef of that calibre would put his name to a restaurant where he doesn’t cook and employ a chef and management that has an attitude of total disdain for its customers.  I know something about fish, a lot more than the people serving me and to be treated the way we were was nothing short of a disgrace.  

I will not be going to another Hix restaurant unless I know for a fact that he is in the kitchen cooking my food.