A bright, airy loft full of culinary surprises
The name Hicce x Wolf & Badger filled me with partial dread. I say “partial”, because the front section, Hicce, is the new restaurant by Pip Lacey, ex-head chef at Angela Hartnett’s Murano and very much a rising star on the British food scene. Hicce is a modern British, woodfire-focused, seasonal restaurant. It’s pronounced “ee-chay”, by the way, and not, as I said the first dozen times, “hicky”, meaning something you notice on your neck the morning after heavy petting at the school disco. Regardless, it was really the Wolf & Badger part of the name that troubled me, because this suggested that the restaurant was inside a shop; and not only that, but one of those shops full of fashionable items such as gorgeous, £198 “statement scarfs” that you hope might change your life, but just leave you exactly the same, only poorer and with a more colourful neck.
Restaurants in shops are generally awful – built by committee and with half the team concerned with things such as preserving footfall to the watch counter. They’re a corporate solution to empty space. Hicce, I’m thrilled to say, avoids these pitfalls completely by being an entirely separate entity, and a beautiful one, too, with its own front door and a wide, welcoming staircase. It has the feel of a capacious, repurposed Manhattan loft, although everything within a square mile of Hicce has been repurposed.
Grace Dent’s restaurant reviews appear in the award-winning food magazine Feast, along with recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi and more top cooks, with the Guardian every Saturday.
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