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Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.
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How Will Gleave made Hill & Szrok more than a steakhouse by Jonathan Nunn
Steakhouse settings: Steak, gravy, beef fat chips, béarnaise, and spinach.
I have a friend who, to the bemusement of everyone who knows him, likes nothing more than to unwind in a steakhouse, where he orders the most uncomplicated steak dinner on the menu. Steakhouses, even bad ones, are his Kryptonite. This friend cooks some of the most technically brilliant food I’ve ever had; he could very easily source his own meat and prepare it better, but chooses not to. He wants to experience the real luxury of the steakhouse, which is to choose everything – the cut, the weight, the cook – and then have everything taken care of; to be swaddled by beef. It is the same reason why we see films and read books with the same plots over and over again, why Twisters is on at the cinema right now, because we already know what’s going to happen and we want to experience it once more, the way it is in our minds. When you go to a steakhouse, you are not just going to that steakhouse but to an archetype, an idea of a steakhouse, because everyone who has ever gone to a steakhouse has only ever wanted the same thing: a bone-in cut from the biggest steer on the blackboard, ordered medium-rare, with a side of chips, a side of creamed spinach and nothing more rococo than a stainless steel tureen of bearnaise. We go to steakhouses to have our most base expectations met: no more, no less.
Cuts and chops.
The first version of Hill & Szrok, a butcher’s shop-by-day turned restaurant-by-night on Broadway Market in London Fields, was a steakhouse that met expectations. The equation was simple: they had beef, they had space for a grill – why not put the two things together? The quality of the steak and the modest mark-up on the butcher’s price made up for the less than luxurious setting: a marble slab counter that until a few hours ago had been laden with sausages and other cuts of raw meat. Then, at the start of this year, Hill & Szrok stopped meeting expectations. Sirloins roughly the shape of Long Island were brought to the table with their coastline of fat removed – separated, snipped into tiny rendered beef nuggets and scattered back onto the steak. Cuts that would never usually be found at a steakhouse started to intrude on the menu: beef twisted into different forms, like Dexter shin and tendon, the overworked sinews of the cow, turned into a shimmering slice of cold jelly. Even better, in the depths of winter, were the other meats: a pristinely roasted Middlewhite pork belly with the best crackling I’ve ever tasted, made tart with apple mustard, or the scrag end of lamb in a Lancashire hotpot, its sliced potato lid cooked to the colour of aged copper. As I’ve eaten there over the last six months, its ambition has become inescapable. The chef responsible for these dishes, Will Gleave, has slowly transformed Hill & Szrok into a steakhouse that exceeds every reasonable expectation...
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