A few weeks before the opening of Mark Hix’s new restaurant on Brewer Street, Soho, and I’m at a prelaunch party. The space is filled with happy faces and a firmament of British cooking stars — Fergus and Margot Henderson, Simon Hopkinson, Jeremy Lee, Valentine Warner — all having a jolly time. Hixy throws a good bash.

He’s also one of the few chefs who is almost universally liked and admired, and not only by his peers. For anyone who wants their dinner without pretension and stuffiness (and that includes me), his kind of seasonal British food, brilliantly cooked, imaginatively sourced, but with an edge of familiarity and comfort, is precisely what you want to eat.

Hix is a very uncheffy chef, and I mean that in a good way. Having a restaurant full of contented diners is clearly more important to him than Michelin stars. “I think it’s about cooking what you like to eat yourself,” he says. “A lot of chefs don’t. A lot of people try too hard. I think some chefs are scared to go that simple. If you’ve got a great bit of beef or chicken, why not just lay it on the grill, then put it on the table for people to share?”

Before leaving to set up his own restaurants in 2007, Hix spent 17 years as executive head chef at The Ivy, Le Caprice and J Sheekey, gradually gravitating towards his own kind of Britishness. He now owns two other restaurants, Hix Oyster & Chop House in Smithfield and Hix Oyster & Fish House in Lyme Regis, the scene, incidentally, of Keith Floyd’s last, glorious lunch. The new place — called, simply, Hix — is, like them, comfortably convivial rather than starchily posh.

Expert View

And the loos, man! Saints alive, at prices like this you can’t give punters an old pub lavvy

Giles Coren

• More

• Post a comment

Related Links

• Red gurnard with steamed cockles and brown shrimps

• Roast partridge with parsnip crisps

• Apple or Cider and Blackberry Jelly

The truth is, Hix doesn’t just work in hospitality, he knows what hospitality is. That’s rarer than it should be among chefs, and the difference shows in how he cooks. “I think some chefs take the whole thing so seriously, they don’t end up having much fun,” he says. “If you’re having fun in the restaurant, then the customers are generally having fun, too.”

The fun follows through in all he does — he’s a man who collects friends easily. Tracey Emin, whom he first met in the 1990s, said recently that she’d had some of her best times with him: “It’s rare for someone so lovely to be as successful as Mark. Every time I eat with him, it’s like coming home.” Well said.

Hix, 66-70 Brewer Street, W1; 020 7292 3518

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Drinks

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies