Review: Hawksmoor

The baking has got me a bit worried. I need to do something a bit manly or my life will be completely out of balance. My yin's up here, my yang's down there. Basically there's a whole yin yang yoyo thing going on and it's making me dizzy. Maybe I could grab a large axe and go chop some wood in a forest somewhere. Perhaps I could try wrestling a crocodile. If I had a shed I'd go sit in it for a while and maybe smoke a pipe. Unfortunately I possess neither an axe nor a shed to put it in, and crocodiles are few and far between around these parts. I'll have to make do with a bull terrier.

This all seems too much like hard work when I could simply take the shortcut to manliness and eat a large quantity of red meat. I say large but the word I'm really looking for is obscene (def: so offensive to chastity or modesty). I want an unchaste slice of animal. I need an immodest portion of protein. I don't care who I offend in the process.

So what would be an obscene amount of meat to consume in one sitting? Well I suppose that depends on where you are in the world and how large your stomach is. At Hawksmoor the options for ribeye are 400g or 600g but just as when the midwife handed me our 3.66kg baby a couple of weeks ago, metric in these cases means nothing to me. Babies come in pounds and ounces and in my experience steaks do too. Luckily my expensive Leiths education has equipped me with a mental imperial conversion calculator. 400g =14oz and 600g = 21oz or 1lb 5oz. That's scarily big. That's over five quarter-pounders big. That really is quite obscene. Just reading the menu gave me the meat sweats.

If I'd made one batch of muffins then a 400g, ahem, I mean 14oz steak would have redressed the balance. However over the course of a week I made several batches of muffins, brownies, friands and financiers. It was clear that only the 21 ouncer was going to do the job of restoring my manliness.

It was quite simply the most sublime piece of meat I have ever tasted. A slab of 28 day hung Longhorn ribeye cooked perfectly medium rare on a charcoal grill. Every single mouthful, and let me tell you there were many, was a mouthful of pure neanderthal joy. With every chew I could feel the testosterone surging through my veins. With every swallow, hairs were sprouting on my chest. I was either turning into Teen Wolf or the steak was doing the trick. I felt as manly as Sean Connery, though not quite as butch as Martina Navratilova. Still, the chances of me being cast in a Gillette commercial were much improved as the memories of muffins began to fade into a haze of meat and bearnaise sauce. I left the restaurant, my yin and yang back in perfect harmony and my voice two octaves lower. Hawksmoor will forever be the shed to which I retreat when times get a little too girly.