HIX Soho

Always love a Hix lunch. Scallops and lobster - can't beat it anywhere in London. Love the Soho restaurant as has a very relaxed vibe, brilliant and friendly staff and the best value and tasting seafood in London.

First visit today at lunch and plainly restaurants which cater primarily for young people don't really warm up till well after we left at 2. I didn't find much to wax lyrical about to be honest. The premises aren't terribly exciting, the service is decent .We both chose from the a la carte menu I found my shellfish soup a little odd- the soup and the pieces of shellfish in it seemed to have been cooked separately- the pieces of fish were tasty enough but the soup itself was over-thickened and not quite warm enough. My Hangar steak was neither tender nor particularly tasty and a lot of people I know would have sent it back. It wasn't awful- just not as pleasant as it could have been. Decent fries ( a side) and tasty peas and broad beans ( another side) though sadly no-one had bothered to skin the latter. To be fair, my wife enjoyed her broad bean puree and breaded Schnitzel rather more than I enjoyed my food. I found the wine list poor value. We had a carafe of the lowest priced white on the list- a Chilean Sauvignon- which for a bottle was priced a little below £30. It was palatable though in the sense of a supermarket wine at maybe £6/£7 a bottle. Altogether our bill with one dessert and one coffee totted up to £96. The question I asked myself while paying and still in my mind now is whether I should be paying that sort of money for middling food. It seems to me that its getting hard to get good quality or good value in the very heart of the west end now with a few exceptions such as Pollen Street Social.. Set lunch menus are getting tediously uninteresting. Nevertheless albeit that I'm stopping well short of an outright recommendation for Hix, I do believe the food I ate today was a little better that the food we ate at Treadwells a few months back and Café Monico more recently.

Hix Soho is buzzing with a mix of modern types and those with a penchant for the fish/seafood that Hix is renowned for. Mark's bar downstairs is cool, dark and fabulous for pre-dinner or just for cocktails at the bar( for drinks only, you get hit with a £2 per head licensing charge ! never seen that before!). The monkfish curry was amazing, but i had the posh fishfingers.....but seriously, they need to sort out their chips.....pale, unremarkable and generally forgettable. I left half of them. They need to be either crisp French fries or triple-cooked, not the school dinner chips I received...(twice, as the first lot weren't hot). Fabulous place though...would go again. thanks!

Went with 4 colleagues from the Hospitality industry and all of them rated the food and service as excellent Well done to the whole team

The perfect combination of cool and down to earth. Great British food, excellent service and contemporary ambiance. Mark's Bar downstairs is one of the best bars in Soho and is perfect for pre- and post-dinner cocktails.

Hix is classy. The price tag goes with that too - but at lunchtime you can take advantage of the excellent set menu at only £19.50 for two courses, which is very good value. I had 'Breaded Indian Rock chicken escalope with a fried Burford Brown egg and capers'. I was impressed with all the adjectives for what was basically chicken escalope, egg and chips, but it was very tasty and well presented. Similarly, Ronnie's Bramley Apple Pie was just apple pie, but clearly Ronnie, the chef, had added his touch and it was pretty good, albeit with a slightly soggy pastry. Service was slick and the crowd was media types doing deals. Fun overall and recommended.

Hix is always a firm favourite, I know it will deliver if I need a trusty restaurant for a client lunch or dinner

From the onset, I feared Hix may be a wrongun; if not a wrongun, then a bloated and misunderstood party boy waking up with a hangover… and finding himself in the wrong decade. Thursday night: we were greeted by a tetchy hoard of suits at the door that bristled as we (rightfully) sauntered past to our reserved table. This first impression was telling, as the place appears to have disappeared irretrievably up its own a**e. All that posturing soon becomes really rather joyless. When we took in the paraphernalia, there was something a bit gross about the overly self-aware kitsch. A Fray Bentos mobile loomed above diners as we racked up sky-high bills. It hit a bum note in terms of nostalgia and humility, instead evoking the spectre of a gaudy, cigar-puffing fat cat laughing at the unsophisticated, spam-gobbling masses. Despite aligning its aesthetic with the YBAs, Hix seems more smug than contemplative or progressive. There wasn't nearly enough irony to carry it off. (Perhaps it’s all part of the provocative schtick though; in which case, it was lost on me). Ordering our first cocktail was laborious; I thought ‘Dirty Martini’ would suffice, but there was a fair bit of eye rolling when I failed to specify my vodka of choice. Service wasn’t geared towards warmth, and our waitress was downright surly when I floundered. My starter of onion soup was alright, but impossible to eat as thick crescents of allium flicked searingly-hot liquor in every direction. The mustard crouton was fiercely peppery (good) but pappy in texture (irksome). Battered squid was fine but unremarkable against, say, a decent Chinese salt-and-pepper number (at half the cost). Herein lay the problem; everything came at a price. There wasn't a crumb of bread at the table, but Hix saw fit to charge four quid for a few parsnip crisps. Oddly, wine and cocktails weren’t extortionate by London standards, but a chicken escalope set us back nearly 20 quid and was bereft of any sides. It was jolly good to eat, but I couldn’t shake the sour taste of relentless swanking. We lost our appetite by dessert. Bag yourself space downstairs at Mark’s Bar and you’ll be laughing: bang-tidy cocktails, an intuitive mixologist and a pretty electric atmosphere. But the restaurant? I won’t be back - not while London’s so choc-a-bloc with places oozing warmth and value in equal measure.

Hix Soho Saturday lunch. Behind a spooky looking door you will find a great restaurant and a brilliant basement bar. Food was very good, service ok, good overall vibe in the Restaurant with interesting artwork. Nice to find Rye Bay seafood on the menu. delicious!

Restaurant is really nice inside, decorated very cool. We sat at a table for two, very close to another couple on a table for two so we felt we had to whisper a little bit. Food was very nice, bit overpriced though as we had steak and fish and they were both fairly average really. Lovely starters and pudding though and the Hix Fix cocktail is delish!