Hix Brewer Street Soho

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar, reviewers for the Financial Times' Alphaville blog site, have been to Hix, a trendy new-ish restaurant in Soho, where the noise and the slow service prove a little too much for Mr Vinegar.

MrV: That is absolutely the last time I will ever arrive before you. Next time I shall sit outside or go to a pub rather than work up a fury in the restaurant.
MrO: Did they keep you waiting long?
MrV: I stood around for five minutes upstairs while the silly girl on reception tried to find the booking. Then the table wasn’t ready because the early sitting hadn’t left yet. Then I had to wait 10 minutes for a drink.
MrO: My my. That must be a record for you.
MrV: Don’t be facetious. It was extremely frustrating. And they had the nerve to tell me that the reason the table was late was because we’d changed the booking by adding another person.
MrO: That sounds fair...
MrV: But we’d changed it at 10 o’clock that morning - more than 10 hours earlier. And they hadn’t said a thing about it altering the availability of the table.
MrO: I can see how that would be frustrating.
MrV: And then when we did get the table, after kicking up a stink, the dreadful place was so abominably noisy that we couldn’t hear each other speak.
MrO: It was quite loud, I agree.
MrV: It’s because they pack them in far too tightly, and there’s no need to do so when they are charging such high prices. Did you see the menu? £60 for a roast chicken.
MrO: Well, it is for two to four people.
MrV: Never mind that. The whole menu looks pricey. And when they are running at least two sittings, perhaps three with the after-theatre crowd in that neck of the woods, jamming people in shoulder to shoulder in a huge place like that is just plain greedy. And it is a stupid thing to do in a restaurant where all the surfaces are hard so there’s nothing to absorb the noise.
MrO: I must say it felt like the customer was at the bottom of a long list of other priorities. I wonder what the food was like.
MrV: We’ll never know, will we? I can’t imagine we are the first to walk out without eating.
MrO: Who knows? The clientele looked like they were there to be seen rather than because they were particularly interested in food.
MrV: They looked a frightful lot, cackling and caterwauling at one another in their guttural accents.
MrO: You’d think that a seasoned restaurateur like Mark Hix – he used to be head chef at Le Caprice – would know all about acoustics and so forth.
MrV: I don’t think he knows about anything other than cooking. He was loafing about with the front of house staff adding precisely nothing that I could see, when he should have been in the kitchen doing what he does best: cooking my dinner.

Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar had one vodka and tonic each, at a total cost of £14, before walking out.
Hix, 66-70 Brewer Street, London, W1F 9TR
Tel: 020 7292 3518
http://www.hixsoho.co.uk/

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