Chef Mark Hix on starting again – from behind a pub bar

The long road back

Chef Mark Hix’s journey from restaurant tycoon to fish truck (and back again)

You need to be an optimist to take on a pub in the current climate. Some might even say mad. Three quarters of publicans in a recent survey for the British Institute of Innkeeping said they believed their businesses had been dealt such a blow that they wouldn’t survive until next summer.

Luckily, though, I am one of life’s optimists. Even though my five restaurants went into administration at the start of the first lockdown, I am determined this is going to be a good and inspiring 2021. It’s why I have come back from London to live permanently in Dorset, where I grew up. I am starting out on a new and better life.

What I found in the dark days of lockdown, when my day job wasn’t there any more, was that I suddenly had a slightly different thinking process going on in my head. And that brought up some fresh ideas – including the fish truck, a converted Chevrolet ambulance that I bought on ebay and parked next to the A35, where I relaunched myself last summer.

By nature, I am also a gambler – though I’ve never been to a casino in my life. I opened my first restaurant, Hix Oyster & Chop House in London, during the credit crunch, and it turned out all right. So taking on a pub in lockdown, and opening it on my 58th birthday, felt like just the right bold step in starting over again.

I’ve always liked pub culand ture my approach to business is to go with my instincts. The Fox in the Dorset village of Cors-combe is where I used to go with my dad in my late teens. It always had a good buzz about it, but it has recently struggled. By this summer, it was only open erratic hours, no more than a couple of days a week. A village pub has got to be open six or seven days a week if its community is going to be persuaded to rely on it, and that’s what we’ve been doing this past month. I’ve dusted down the smart tweed suits I thought I’d put away for ever when I left my London restaurants behind, and – despite the restrictions of the current tier system, which we are observing to the letter – bookings are flying in.

But it’s about more than the right clothes and being open all hours. Taking on The Fox – something I wasn’t in the right mindset even to contemplate a year ago – has made me think hard about what makes a pub work. I’ve tried to get the beer right – using local suppliers. And I’m friends with the peorun ple who the local Black Cow vodka distillery in Beaminster up the road – they use the whey from milk to produce a smooth vodka that, I can say from experience, makes a great martini.

I am also trying to serve good pub food using ingredients from local makers. That is another way in which you can root your pub firmly in your community. Behind the bar, I’ve put fox-handled tankards that we are engraving with the names of regulars. I want them to feel The Fox belongs to them. And we plan to run a regular farmers’ market in our car park at the front – just next to where the school bus stops.

As a novice licensee, I’m discovering that running a pub is in some ways like running a good restaurant. But it is also very different. We opened under tier 2 restrictions, which meant people could only come if they ate something ‘substantial’, but I believe that – in normal times – a village pub has to be somewhere everyone can feel comfortable; so that everyone from locals and ‘local Londoners’ (second homers), farmers to tourists walking in the countryside can come here to have a few pints, meet their mates, and (so I am told) to escape from the family. The biggest challenge is creating the right atmosphere – bigger than restarting under tier 2 rules. After all, you can buy cheap beer in a Wetherspoon’s, but why would you want to go there? The community pub has to offer more if it is to survive.

I am just starting out in my new life, and I have plenty still to learn and it hasn’t been easy starting afresh after losing what I had built up over a career of almost 40 years. With optimism to keep me going, though, I’ve made it thus far, and I am glad to have you with me in this column for the journey ahead as – like so many others right now – I embark on a new life as a result of Covid.

One bit of encouraging news is that I’m beginning to be treated like a local again, not a ‘local Londoner’. The fishermen down at the Cobb in Lyme, people I grew up with, have welcomed me back at the Harbour Inn and The Volunteer to drink cider with them. It’s quite a change from negronis at the Groucho Club in Soho with artsy London types. And one I am liking.

I’ve dusted down the smart tweed suits I thought I’d put away for ever when I left London