In 18th Century London, meat lovers formed ‘beefsteak clubs’, to celebrate the cow in all its cooked forms. Members wore rings inscribed with ‘beef and liberty’ and met in wood-panelled restaurants and coffee houses to eat towers of steaks washed down with porter and port.
Head down the stairs to Hawksmoor Guildhall, a new wood-panelled love song to meat in the heart of the city, and you may be forgiven for thinking you’ve travelled back to the time of the beefsteaks. Here, all is juicy 35-day-aged rib eye, prime rib and porterhouse. Glasses clink, brows are mopped and, while there may be a couple of vegetarian nods on the menu, everywhere you look people are getting down to the serious business of eating meat.
‘We wanted to create something that felt like it had been in the area for a long time, and was already ‘lived in’ by the time it opened, rather than shiny and new,’ says Huw Gott, co-owner of Hawksmoor. Guildhall is the third restaurant in the much loved mini-chain. Huw and co-owner Will Beckett also run busy sites in Covent Garden and Spitalfields. But at 182 covers (plus 50 in the bar), Hawksmoor Guildhall is the self-proclaimed ‘beef geeks’’ biggest project yet.
To give the restaurant a timeless style, Gott worked with interior architects Macaulay Sinclair to source reclaimed materials. Those wood-panels that give the room its cosy, members’ club feel? Specimen cabinets from the Natural History Museum. The bar front is a former Dutch bank counter and the teak floor and copper lights in the wine room come from the 1920s University of the Arts Building in Mayfair.
‘Using reclaimed and British materials is important to us,’ says Gott. ‘It creates the right character. The most important thing for us is that customers feel happy and comfortable, that they have a good time. Walking into a really new restaurant often doesn’t help that, whereas somewhere that already feels lived in, that has some age and character to it, helps. I think older restaurants generally feel a bit more comfortable.
‘Guildhall feels very traditional compared to our other restaurants. It’s actually around the corner from the site of Dolly’s, the first steakhouse on record. We wanted it to make sense to the area it’s in. We went round lots of old city members’ clubs, popped our heads in old banks and city institutions and took inspiration from there.’
Although unmistakably British in its design and ethos, anyone who’s ever spent time in a New York or Chicago steakhouse will recognise much at Hawksmoor, from the art deco touches in the bar to the cult burger, lobster Mac ‘n’ cheese and new Shortrib French Dip sandwich, an artery-bothering creation stuffed with braised shortribs, Ogleshield cheese and mustard, which you dunk into bone-marrow gravy.
‘There’s definitely some truth that we’re influenced by American steakhouses. Even though the steakhouse was invented over here, I think its spiritual home has become America. We use British produce but we don’t try and make it too ‘themed’ British. There are definitely some things that cross over, like the hamburger, lobster roll and shortrib sandwich on the bar menu.’
Celebrating British beef and produce is at the heart of everything Beckett and Gott, whose grandfather was the last in a long line of butchers, do. ‘We love British produce and poking around and finding out a bit of food history. We’ve got a row of Victorian cookbooks on the shelf that we dip into when we’re looking for new dishes. Britain was always revered around the word for the quality of its produce, especially the meat and particularly the beef. We’ve lost that reputation a bit, but it’s still out there. There are still farmers doing things the old-fashioned way, producing beef that’s as good as it’s ever been. It’s great to make the most of that and celebrate it.’
The apogee of this beef geekery is Hawksmoor Guildhall’s ‘Tongue to Tail’ beef tasting menu. For £700, you and 8-10 friends can take a 7-course tour of a cow around an alcove table at the back of the restaurant. Bring stretchy trousers for a menu that includes beef tea, tongue and tail salad, oysters with shortrib and kimchi, beef shin macaroni and suet sticky toffee pudding.
‘It’s been great to see how many people have gone for the beef sharing menu, it’s been lots of fun,’ says Gott, who says the veal chop with oysters is his favourite thing on the Guildhall menu, and testing the dishes is one of his favourite parts of the job. ‘We did loads of tastings for our new breakfast menu, too. It was great having a go at all the classics and trying to make them our own in some way. We tried lots of different pancake recipes and cures of bacon. I’m fortunate enough to stay incredibly skinny. I fear one day it’s all going to hit me and I’ll wake up in the morning three times the size I am now.’
Right now, there’s no rest for the beef geeks. Hawksmoor at Home, the restaurant’s first cookbook, has just hit the shelves and there are plans to add a basement bar to the original Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. Gott and Beckett are even encouraging customers to form their own Beefsteak clubs in the manner of their 18th-century forebears. To beef, liberty and Shortrib French dip sandwiches!
