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‘Losing everything was a blessing’
Peter Stanford meets chef Mark Hix
This spring Mark Hix lost his restaurant empire.
While most of us would have accepted defeat, the renowned chef dusted himself down, bought a food truck off ebay and started selling fish from the side of a road.
In his new weekly column starting in January, Hix will chronicle how he intends to get back on his feet. But first, Peter Stanford gets an update. Photography by Nicholas J R White
For someone whose restaurant empire collapsed just as Covid-19 hit, Mark Hix is looking surprisingly content with his lot, sitting in his faded blue Guernsey jumper and battered jeans, on a pub window seat deep in the lanes of his native Dorset. ‘In hindsight,’ he says, ‘it has all been a bit of a blessing in disguise. Forget the money and investment that I lost. And, yes, there were a few months of sitting there scratching my head. But now I am starting over.’ He grins cheekily, like someone who can’t quite believe his luck. ‘It feels like a new beginning.’
Back in the summer, The Telegraph’s restaurant critic, William Sitwell, wrote in these pages about finding 57-year-old Hix – whose eponymous London restaurants had made him a food-industry legend – selling fish and snacks out of a converted Chevrolet ambulance food truck, parked up next to the A35 near to his home town of Bridport. That was Hix’s first bottom-rung-of-the-catering-ladder step in trying to put what he called his ‘annus horribilis’ behind him. ‘The article struck such a chord,’ he recalls. ‘We had loads of people at the truck afterwards who were so, so supportive.’
Five months on, the various local ingredients he has assembled for his renaissance are coming nicely to the boil. Next, Hix was able to buy back from the administrator for just £15,000 his Oyster & Fish House in Lyme Regis, after a higher bidder for the prime site in the seaside town dropped out. From the minute it reopened, he reports, it has been ‘madly busy’, and he is there every evening once he has finished at the food truck.
‘I am quite conscious that if I am in the kitchen then the customers aren’t necessarily going to see me, so I am front of house. I think customers prefer that,’ he muses, rubbing his hands up and down his unshaven cheeks. ‘Being seen is how you get respect from your regulars. It makes them see the place in such a different light.’
Now, his diary is about to get even more congested because he is going to have to balance his mornings at the fish truck and his evenings at The Oyster & Fish House with spending time at The Fox Inn, the 17th-century village pub where we are talking. It’s in Corscombe, halfway between Bridport and Yeovil. Hix recently bought the lease from the previous landlady, the mother of the singer PJ (Polly) Harvey. It is all low beams, big fireplaces and old-world charm, with a skittle alley out back.
‘Polly’s mum, Eva, was a good friend of my dad in West Bay [near Bridport], so I’ve always known them. Eva asked me about taking it on last year, but most of my business was in London then. I was living there, and I just wasn’t in a position to do it. Now, in my new life down here I can, so I have.’
He shows me the renovations being done to get the pub ready to reopen in time for Christmas, and how he is styling the particular look – ‘bringing a bit of London to the countryside’. Which means? ‘It’s about nice country food, good bangers and mash from a local farm, fish from Lyme, game and partridges from local shoots. Nothing sophisticated, but the sophisticated bit will be nice silver cutlery and nice silver vegetable dishes.’
He seems every inch a man in his element. ‘I suppose,’ he concedes, ‘I am a workaholic, but I just like seeing things coming together.
Over the years I’ve never hired an interior designer. I just do my own thing along with the architects.’
And he certainly has an exacting eye. As we pass the bar, his glance settles momentarily on a small red fire extinguisher that I had hardly clocked. But Hix has, and asks someone to move it somewhere it doesn’t spoil the carefully casual look.
Instead of his friend Damien Hirst’s Cock and Bull – a Hereford cow and a cockerel preserved in a tank of formaldehyde – which stood in his trendy Tramshed restaurant in east London, drinkers and diners at The Fox Inn are going to be greeted by mounted stag
‘Locals are saying I’m going to turn their pub into a fancy restaurant. Of course I’m not’
heads and antlers, quirky fox-handled tankards, and some of the fish-mouth glug-glug jugs he has been hoarding for years. The line between Hix’s own possessions and the business’s is a blurred one, which means that the collapse into administration must have been even more painful.
‘In some ways,’ he says, ‘this pub is a diversion. It’s inland. It’s not going to be that fishy, though there will be fish on the menu, and cured and smoked anchovies and local Lyme Bay prawns on the bar. And I’m not going to put my name on it [which he can now do, having also bought back the rights to trade as Hix from the administrators]. I want to keep it as a pub for the locals, with a little bit of restaurant added to it – somewhere farmers can come and have a pint.’
How has the village taken to his arrival? ‘With lots of questions. They are all gossiping. “Oh, he’s going to turn it into a fancy restaurant.” Of course, I’m not.’
In fairness to the good folk of Corscombe, it is a reasonable enough worry, given Hix’s track record of expensive, upmarket, cosmopolitan eateries. But what they are going to find is that The Fox Inn is all about the reborn Mark Hix, the local boy who may have made and lost a fortune in the bright lights of the capital, but who has come home to start again. And to do it differently.
This year has been traumatic for hospitality venues, so some might regard Hix’s decision to go into the pub trade as a peculiar one. To understand more, though, they need look no further than one of the framed pictures waiting to go up in his planned ‘kitchen library’ at the back of the pub, which will be lined with his collection of 2,000 old cookery books, and available for private dinners. It is an old black-and-white shot of his grandad, Bill, in his full regalia as mayor of Bridport. ‘He ran a pub,’ Hix explains, ‘so I am following his footsteps.’ He has renamed the pub’s conservatory restaurant ‘Bill’s Room’.
After his parents split up when he was just six, Hix’s father (now dead) had custody – ‘my mum left us, so we’ve never been that close’ – but Mark also spent a lot of time with his paternal grandparents. ‘My grandad was the inspiring person in my life, though I didn’t realise it until much later on, after he died. When people say, “Where do you get your energy?”, it’s from my grandad. He was mayor of the town, chairman of the football club, a great gardener, a prize chrysanthemum grower, worked as a painter and decorator, and [at one stage] he had a pub. We’d sit together in the evening, laughing at The Two Ronnies and Benny Hill while he wrote his invoices.’
As a teenager, Hix was so good at golf – his first set of clubs are among the vast collection of ‘good tat’ that he has decanted for temporary storage into the skittle alley – that he