The Times

By Giles Coren

Last week’s letters column contained an inquiry from a chap called Gordy Lincoln, accusing me of “consistently failing to order pudding”. He made it sound pretty serious. “Consistently failing” has the chilling ring of the magistrate’s court about it. Or, worse, the school report. Should I persist in this attitude, he seemed to be saying, I would find myself having to repeat the year, and go right back to doing pointless little 100-word Time Out reviews (in pencil) of “cheap eatz”, before I was let loose on a national newspaper colour supplement again.
He went on to ask: “Just what is it you have against this course? Or, perish the thought, does Esther have you on some sort of diet?”
And the thing is that he was not far wide of the mark. I have never been a supporter of the pudding as a course in its own right. It is rationalised by mere convention and is a relic of 18th-century vanities, Antonin Carême and the heyday of service à la russe.
Nutritionally, it contains nothing of value at all. It’s just sugar and starch or, at a push, a bit of fruit poached, roasted or baked to well past the point where anything useful in it is left intact. Pudding is nothing but wasted calories, meaningless sugar spike, tragic glycaemic overload.
I eat 4,000-5,000 calories a day as it is, which is twice the recommended daily intake. As a consequence, I try to exercise properly about four times a week, which is just enough to stay the right side of critically obese. If I ate pudding as well I would either have to live on a treadmill, taking my meals liquidised through a tube as I ran, or I’d have to accept swelling to the size of a Texan.
But then my fingers would be too fat to type. Each flabby-digited punch at a key would depress seven or eight letters at a time and this review would have begun: “op.lrxfcdarxfcdajbi bvfcwraewrEWIJK.” And then you’d really have had something to write letters about.
Also, I don’t have a sweet tooth. The taste for sweet things does not normally last much past puberty in men, except in those pudgy-faced, childlike fellows in Guardian mail-order shoes you see sitting alone by the aisle in cinemas, buried in a king-size carton of pick’n’mix, like pigs rootling in a bin.
I just can’t imagine who would go to a restaurant for the puddings. Pudding is just a sugar hit for diners who have drunk too much and need a lift to get them out of the restaurant and into the car. And besides, who on earth has room for pudding after two courses of the kind of monstrous portions restaurants now provide, in response to years of heckling by their increasingly lard-arsed clientele?
I usually order three or four starters between two, for the sake of an overview, then three mains to share, and a couple of sides. My eyes, at the start of any meal (reviewing or otherwise), are bigger than my belly. But by the time I am done with my mains, my belly has caught up and is once again bigger than my eyes (which is an aesthetic blessing, if nothing else). So then, when I am sitting there stuffed as hell, they bring me another menu. And my newly small eyes just want them to go away.
But they insist, prodding it towards me. I roll my eyes and heave and fart and wave them away. But still they grovel and fawn. Sometimes I get the whine about how distraught the new pastry chef will be if I don’t try her tortured sugar weasel in its raspberry cage, and I have to pull the man down to my slumping eye level and give him the full Mr Creosote.
Even then they’ll bring petits fours with the coffee, which I am compelled to load on to the handle end of a spoon and then, banging the scoop end with my fat fist, launch into the chandeliers.
So perhaps you will give me a break for not having had pudding at Mark Hix’s intriguingly named new Soho restaurant, HIX (is it an acronym for something? A Latin pun?), although there were eight available, including an “Amedei chocolate mousse” – presumably some variation on the less popular Opus Dei chocolate mousse, which contains no chocolate and is delivered straight to the naked back of the diner by means of a cat-o’-nine-tails.
It’s hardly surprising I didn’t have room. My pal Jez and I had started, over a pair of Martinis made from Hammersmith gin, with a plate of Trealy Farm cured meats: slices of English pig cured in the European style, lovely and sweet and fatty, and slapped down on the table with a basket of warm bread.
Then I ordered “Manx queenies with wild boar bacon” which elicited from Jez the earnest inquiry, “Is homosexuality still illegal in the Isle of Man?”, but brought us a plate of ten or twelve small, unbelievably sweet scallops scattered with crispy bacon. For a third starter we had a dish of cod’s tongues and girolles, and then for a fourth there was “Heaven and earth”, a huge, very smooth, individual blood sausage with mash and apples.
So I was pretty damn stuffed even before I ate a rich, densely crusted, Herdwick mutton, kidney and oyster pie with a gratinated oyster on the side, a bucket of matchstick fries and a yard of buttered sprout tops. And there was no question of my even looking at the menu again, thank you. No, really. I’m not saying it again, GO AWAY!
Mark Hix is the king of British food gathering. He knows everything and everyone. And when he’s not out snorkelling for Welsh sea urchins to be grilled with a rare Monmouthshire blue potato and a side of Kentish starlings, he is tucking into a yard of Chiswick Whisky – as was I at the end of the night in question. Who knew they made whisky in Chiswick? The answer, as it always is in these matters, is Mark Hix.
The other thing Mark knows is art. Or, at least, artists. He’s got mobiles by his mates hanging from the ceilings here, Damien Hirst has fixed fish in Perspex blocks (why change a winning formula?) and Sarah Lucas has done things with tins of Fray Bentos pies (not involving opening them, thank the Lord). The place was humming with artists and art dealers, foodies, flopsies and assorted drunks, scattered across the downstairs bar and the ground-floor restaurant, and had the most energetic, captivating “buzz” of any new restaurant I’ve encountered in a long, long time. It wasn’t just New Yorky, it was television New Yorky.
Some people grouch that it’s all about being in Mark’s gang, and that there is sometimes a “them and us” feeling in his restaurants. And maybe that is sometimes true (he was executive chef of the Ivy-Caprice group, after all). But you simply don’t get what people call a “buzz” in a roomful of strangers and out-of-town sightseers huddled round a bread roll and a glass of tap water.
The truth is that Mark goes at everything full tilt, with unlimited enthusiasm and high ambition, and is far more enthused by the idea of possible massive success than cowed by the fear of falling short. He wants everybody to have great food and a spanking night out, regardless of whether he knows them or not. And most of the time he succeeds. And sometimes there’s a bum night, and everyone hits the buffers, whoever they are. God knows, I’ve spent three hours drunk on a cold pavement outside Hix Oyster & Chop House before now, waiting for a table I’d booked three weeks before. And that was after I gave him a rave review. So he’s a democrat, if nothing else.
He got this place for a song after the money side caved in on Aaya, the excellent Japanese that was here before, and he has brought it back into what he calls a “rugged Georgian” style (having to do with 18th-century Britishness rather than nearness to Azerbaijan) but left the bright, airy kitchen in place, which keeps the cooks very happy, as well as the low, zinc sushi bar downstairs, possibly the most comfortable in London, which he has converted, obviously, into a booze bar, the excellent barmen keeping bottles cold in what once were fish cabinets.
There’s a bar-billiards table down there now, soft seating, exotic cocktail ingredients from as far afield as Ealing and Bow, and all the bonhomie and booziness of an old-fashioned pub lock-in to while away the after-dinner hours. And if you’d rather have a slice of chocolate cake than all that, well, that’s your problem, Fatty.