Liverpool Street Chop House: Should you go over Hawksmoor, Boisdale?
The closure of Threadneedle Street’s M Restaurant earlier this year, after a decade slinging the capital’s finest steak, was a genuine blow. One of the restaurants that helped the Square Mile shake off its stuffy reputation, it combined a meticulous, scholarly appreciation of meat with a sense of fun, even whimsy. Robot waiters, wine vending machines, lots of dogs.
Now M founder Martin Williams is the head of the Evolv restaurant group (formerly D&D London, even formerly-er Terence Conran’s eponymous food empire) and it feels appropriate – nay destined – that his first big opening would be a restaurant serving steak to the people of the Square Mile.
Liverpool Street Chop House and Tavern is the sister restaurant to Paternoster Chop House and Tavern, which opened more than 20 years ago beside the London Stock Exchange but has since moved moved down the road to the Old Bailey. I haven’t eaten there in years, not since my days as a reporter trying to wheedle both stories and steaks out of investment bankers, but my memories of it are… well, I don’t really have any memories of it, which doesn’t bode well. I remember not being desperate to go back.
This could be awkward… Over the years, Martin has become a friend – he was at my wedding a few weeks ago. Am I going to have to write that his first restaurant in his new job is a damp squib? Thankfully not.
As you waft into Liverpool Street Chop House, through a terrace filled with men wearing suits, past the signs for £5 pints of Guinness (in this economy!?!), into a wood-panelled 18th century warehouse, the ghost of M lingers in the air like cigar smoke.
More than anywhere else on Evolv’s books, Chop House is a paean to meat. After I’m seated, a waiter rumbles over with a trolley filled with the cuts of the day, spinning it around like a magician showing you the sides of his box before he chops his assistant in half. Here’s the fillet, here’s the intimidating-looking, bone-in ribeye, here are the chops. Meat, meat, meat, meat, meat.
Furnished with a pint of Guinness, I sit through a lecture on sustainability and how everything is ethically sourced from farms that use regenerative farming and I know I should be paying attention but somehow I’m just admiring the fire-engine red banquettes and the dark parquet floors, wondering if they’re original, and the waiter is still talking about carbon and grass but I’ve properly zoned out and I’m just staring – really, really staring – into the deep white veins of marbling in that ribeye. When I glance up, the waiter’s looking expectantly at me, clearly awaiting a response.
“That’s great, mate,” I say. Apparently satisfied, he wheels away his wizard’s box of meat. When he returns I tell him I want the ribeye I’ve been eyeing. And some rarebit fries and some devilled lamb’s liver and some creamed leeks.
As you can probably tell, this is a menu with few frills. It’s the kind of menu a gang of 1950s Welsh coal miners would know their way around. You can get oysters and you can get shrimp and you can get meat. If you’re feeling adventurous you can get a suet pudding or a whole pig’s head.
And bloody hell it’s good. From the dark sourdough served with a little skillet of molten Jersey butter, it’s hit after hit. Those lamb’s livers may be devilled but mostly you can taste the unmistakably heavy, iron-y heft of offal, cooked a dash too long for my tastes but delicious nonetheless. The rarebit fries are soft, wonderful, pillowy tubes of fried cheese, the comfort food you’ll be served after getting into heaven, to get your strength back up.
And that ribeye: a monstrous thing, really. Vast and pink and rimmed by a layer of fat as thick as your thumb, neither liquid nor solid but some perfect state in-between. I don’t need to tell you what great steak tastes like: it is the essence of cow. It is blood and fat and marrow. It is divine. Somehow, with the help of an excellent Pinot Noir, the ribeye vanishes (another magic trick!). There is no room for dessert. There is no room for breakfast.
Martin tells me that, of all the brands in the Evolv portfolio, Chop House (alongside Bluebird) is the one he wants to roll out across the country. Part of me is pleased: good for the people of Manchester or Birmingham or Edinburgh or wherever it ends up. But the other part of me – the terrible, greedy part that just devoured an obscene amount of bone-in ribeye – wants to keep it all to myself.