Hill & Szrok, E8

Dead meat

If you’re reading this, it means Hill & Szrok is dead.

Well, that’s not true, but it’s close. The up-market Broadway Market butcher shop will serve its final evening dinner service this Friday, January 24th, after eleven years of slinging steaks to diners squeezed around its marble butcher’s block.

The butcher itself is going nowhere, and has plans to repurpose its kitchen towards deli products and takeaway lunches, but blaming “the challenges of staffing,” it says it’s time to say goodbye to the restaurant.

There was a time not so very long when I wouldn’t have mourned it much. Truth be told, I’d never been in a rush to do dinner at Hill & Szrok until last summer Jonathan Nunn declared it the best meal he’d eaten all year, crediting head chef Will Gleave with making it “more than a steakhouse.”

I promptly made a mental note to fit a visit in, and over the following five months failed to do anything of the sort. Until, that is, Hill & Szrok dropped the New Year’s Eve bomb that time was running out. I’ve eaten Gleave’s cooking twice since then, and now do mourn my loss — for the meals no longer to come but also those I didn’t know I was missing all this time.

Starters are simple, sparse. Thick slices of nutty soda bread with a pat of pale gold butter. Aged beef sobrasada smeared across sourdough, studded with small peppers and dripping with just a little too much honey. Best by far is chicken liver pâté, a slab of perfect pink flesh almost as hefty as the pork chop that follows it, and with a fat cap to match. It arrives with sweet Cumberland jelly, sharp pickle, and toasted brioche on which to pile them all high. I had pâté again two nights later, a duck liver parfait at The Marksman, but it was this that I guiltily pictured on my plate, like the other lover I couldn’t quite get out of my mind.

This is a butcher, and besides the steaks and poultry aging in a tiled enclave, meat features heavily — it’s the only type of main on the menu. Gleave found a format, and near-perfected it: a large cut, built for sharing, cooked pink, fat at once crisp and decidedly wobbly; a small blob of sharp sauce, perhaps an apple mustard with pork, mint with lamb, Shrewsbury with venison; a deep brown pool of gravy to unite the two, a glistening lake that cries out to be dunked into.

In the predictably dim light that signifies that you are in a Restaurant these days, our venison appears a black heap surrounded by a dark ichor with a carnivorous hint of red. Elderberry capers and wafer thin slices of quince top the huddled meat, hiding an immaculately rare interior. A saddleback pork chop is more simply presented — meat, mustard, gravy — but I love it all the more for that. This is pork treated like steak, trusted to deliver the goods with little assistance required. It’s the second-best pork chop I’ve ever eaten, and it might only be rose-tinted glasses keeping it from the top spot.

Much has been made of the beef fat chips, which are in truth fries with more than a passing resemblance to the ones that come in a red cardboard box. I’ve never eaten McDonald’s fries cooked in beef tallow; they changed the recipe the year I was born. I suspect that means that Gleave hasn’t either, imbuing these with an imagined nostalgia, a copy of a copy of potatoes someone else once ate. They’re impressive, golden-hued with a momentary crunch, though fail to pass the most important test: Vivian, who has never met a potato she didn’t love, thinks they’re just fine. Perhaps they’re only French fries after all.

Both times I visit, there is but a single dessert rounding off the menu: a warm chocolate mousse surrounding an island of soft cream, but hiding treasure in the form of fragments of sour, brandy-soaked cherries. The first time I come we’ve over-ordered, and I feel burdened by the time the mousse arrives. The second time I plan more carefully, leave space strategically to make sure the mousse gets its dues, because it’s something a little special. This is a bowl of balance: rich but light, sharp yet sweet, moreish while proving a perfect cap to a heavy meal.

You probably can’t ever eat Will Gleave’s cooking at Hill & Szrok. There are three dinner services left, and no bookings available — I should know, otherwise I’d have one of them. With a resume that includes small plates at P. Franco, yakitori at Peg, and now heaving hunks of meat at a butcher, I suspect that whatever comes next will be something different again. But this time I won’t wait until it’s closing to find out.