When someone tells me that a restaurant serves the ‘best (insert relevant food here)’ in London, I tend to take it with a pinch of salt, even when it’s several critics doing the shouting. Hawksmoor was billed by many to serve the ‘best steak’ in town, so, having eaten far too many overpriced & low quality steaks, it was somewhere that really needed to be checked out.

Having booked a table for Miss P & I, I then started to wonder what steak I should order. Steaks can be booked in advance, which certainly piqued my interest and, not wanting to be left with a type of steak that may not have been my first choice, I decided to do some research. Pretty much my first port of call for anything foody related is Twitter, these days, even over the ubiquitous Google. I put out the shout, asking my foody friends what type of steak I should reserve in advance and was rather pleasantly surprised to get an answer back from The Hawksmoor itself! A Porterhouse steak was the recommendation, so after having a quick discussion over the phone with The Hawksmoor over the size that should be reserved (“1 big appetite and 1 more dainty, but only slightly”), a 900g Porterhouse was locked down and in the bag.

The starters consisted of fairly straightforward fare, with the likes of Scallops with Peas & Mint, Smoked Salmon & cured meats, but that fits in very neatly with the whole ethos of sourcing great ingredients and not fiddling about with them too much. Miss went for a half dozen oysters and I plumped for the Dorset crab. Both were good, but neither worth getting too worked up about.

The mains, rather unsurprisingly were a combination of steak, with more steak and a little more in case you missed the first two. There’s a blackboard in the restaurant that lists the sizes & types of steak on offer that night, with ones no longer available having been crossed out (so if you’d have wanted the 900g Porterhouse that night, you were out of luck... loser). Provenance is courtesy of the Ginger Pig, so I knew the meat was definitely going to be up there with the best from the start. Side dishes were considered and the triple cooked chips & winter coleslaw seemed most appropriate (you can’t not have chips/frites with steak and a bit of roughage also seemed in order).

So, the steak. The Porterhouse steak. The 900g Porterhouse steak at £6 per 100g, cooked in the ‘best’ steakhouse in London. How did it do? I think OH, MY, GOD is perhaps the most appropriate answer. If any steak were to turn me religious, then the fabulous piece of charred flesh we were presented with, would be it. Bloody fantastic. Both Miss P & I were pretty much in awe.

We finished off with a trifle and a couple of glasses of Tokaji, but to be honest, I think we were still reminiscing about the steak.

The atmosphere is pretty relaxed and the service is efficient. It’s never going to be the cheapest place to eat steak, but even paying £54 for a steak to share between two people, I would still consider that value for money. If you’re a vegetarian, I probably wouldn’t advise you to go, but everyone else. Just do it. Now.