Mon—Thu 11am—11.30pm; Fri 11am—midnight; Sat 10am—midnight; Sun 10am—11.30pm
The style:
Taking over from the much-loved Thatched House pub, this is the second site from husband-and-wife team Gus and Laura Evans. The Butcher’s Hook in Fulham has been going strong for 10 years and regularly picks up awards for its food and wine selection. This Hammersmith venture promises much of the same.
The pub has been fully refurbished, from the new bar to the large beer garden. The dark snugs have been brightened up and a centre-standing fireplace installed in the restaurant. It looks very similar to any other high-end gastropub in London—stripped wood floors and furniture, chalkboards, neutral décor and an open fire.
The crowd:
On a Wednesday evening the place was gently bustling with couples dining, office workers and a few groups of friends squeezing out the last drops of sunshine in the garden. However, it’s a bit of an odd location, which was always the Thatched House’s problem. Flanked on one side by a mega-estate and a triangle of quiet residential streets, optimistically referred to as ‘Brackenbury Village’, on the other by an area with little foot traffic, it’s a bit out of the way.
The food:
The Butcher’s Hook in Fulham is renowned for very good food and even more for its food and wine matching. That ethos has been transferred to Hammersmith, with the menu designed around the wine to match your dish—although offering a bottle of wine to match starters is perhaps a little ambitious, and could make closing time interesting.
It’s not often you see red mullet on menus these days, even less so as a starter in escabeche form (seared and marinated in a vinegary sauce) so that was a shoo-in really. At £6.95 it offered up a gorgeously fatty, fleshy piece of fish in a tongue-sapping vinegar marinade with thin slips of carrot. It was exactly what you want from an escabeche. The pan-fried scallops (£7.50) came with hunks of crispy bacon and a cauliflower puree, a dish that must be a staple of almost every gastropub menu from here to the Orkney Islands. The scallops were fat and well cooked, the bacon offered the savoury and the cauliflower the sweet—a nice starter but nothing new.
For the mains we went for a slow-braised lamb shoulder (£15.50) and pan-fried hake (£14.50). The lamb was slow-cooked and so tender that it could be considered a ‘pulled lamb’ dish. Served with red cabbage and mashed potato, it wasn’t the most elegant of dishes but tasted a lot better than it looked. The pan-fried hake came with broad beans and a cockle butter sauce and was really excellent. Crispy skin on top of perfectly cooked white fish, alongside firm broad beans and salty cockles, all in the lightest of butter sauces. Normally ‘butter sauce’ means your dinner sails over on a tidal wave of cream, wine, butter and chives. Thankfully The Butcher’s Hook has avoided that hideous serving trait.
The dessert menu was, again, more ‘old favourites’ than anything revolutionary. The passion fruit crème brûlée (£6.50) was chock-full with passion fruit flavour, which isn’t easy to achieve, and very light. Served with some buttery shortbread, it was sweet and delicate in appearance and taste. The raspberry and white chocolate mille-feuille (£6.50) was very well flavoured but evidently not entirely homemade. A mille-feuille should be a delicate stack of three layers of crispy puff pastry—the ‘thousand leaves’ (mille feuille) of the name—and two of thick crème pâtissière. The crème pâtissière in this case was good, if a bit runny, but the interior layers of puff pastry were raw, or very close to. Topped with plump raspberries and shards of white chocolate, it tasted decent, but the whole thing was a bit dense and clunky.
The drinks:
Our wine choice, as advised by the menu, was a bottle of Argentinian Obra Prima Malbec (£36), a rich, chocolatey wine that was dangerously drinkable and packed full of flavour. It complimented the lamb a lot better than any other dish, but then again it was the lamb’s wine match, and very well matched too.
The Butcher’s Hook is a good pub and serves good food—it won’t set your world on fire but then sometimes you don’t want things set on fire. You just want a welcoming neighbourhood pub for a relaxed dinner and drinks. And that’s what you have here, in bucket loads. They’ve played it safe but played it well.
