Hill & Szrok Public House, restaurant review: 'This thoroughly modern pub hasn't lost sight of traditional values'

Few of the new meateries deserve to succeed as much as this one on the fringes of the City, says Tracey Macleod

The restaurant has the feel of a traditional City dining room temporarily occupied by YBAs

London's Old Street roundabout on a winter's day is not easily confused with southern California. But this traffic-reamed interzone between the City and Shoreditch was once the heart of the tech start-up scene: our very own Palo Alto, only with more minicab offices and kebab shops. The area's vacant office buildings incubated a host of web developers, before the property developers and Hackney council conspired to drive them out and flatten their premises. A new landscape of shiny high-rise blocks now surrounds Silicon Roundabout, the triumph of the bean-counters over Nathan Barley and his tribe.

One small undeveloped patch survives amid the mirrored towers, and in it, the handsome Victorian pub newly reborn as Hill & Szrok Public House. The love child of a butcher, a chef and a bar manager, it embodies the same plucky, punchy optimism as the area's dispersed start-ups – a thoroughly modern pub which hasn't lost sight of the traditional values of warmth and conviviality.

Tom Richardson-Hill and Alex Szrok already operate a well-liked butchers shop of the same name in Broadway Market. By night, it turns cookshop, serving up meaty feasts at a communal marble table. Their new pub, formerly The 3 Crowns, is equally meat-focused. Next to the open kitchen counter, a display fridge houses a side of prime beef: you can watch the meat ageing alongside the chefs.

Launching amid a slew of similarly monomaniacal meateries including Zelman Meats and Shotgun, Hill & Szrok is well positioned to offer City straights a taste of downtown laissez-faire, and Shoreditch scenesters a safe haven of bookable civilisation. The restaurant area, with dark, panelled walls and scribbly paintings, has the feel of a traditional City dining room temporarily occupied by YBAs. White paper cloths are clamped round tables, and wine is served in school-style Duralex glass tumblers. But the effect is crisp, rather than spartan, and there's a long office-party-friendly marble table, a nod to the original Hackney shop.

With a butcher at the helm, the kitchen operates on nose-to-tail principles. A single pig might yield pork scratchings, sausages, faggots and lard for pastry, as well as the more obvious cuts.

Pork liver and mushroom pâté, porchetta and salsa verde sandwich and a pork chop all feature on the shortish menu of the day, as well as chipolatas, incongruously listed alongside the veg as a side dish. But it's surprising not to see more innards on offer: today's fairly conventional, chassis-based selection includes beef rump and côte de boeuf as specials, along with a few fish and veg dishes to mitigate the hardcore carnism.

Proving that the non-meat dishes are much more than an afterthought is a starter of caramelised parsnips, sweetly butting up against a cloud of whipped goats' curd animated by a loose, grassy pesto, crackling with roasted hazelnuts. A special of whole bream, its grill-blackened skin doused in salt and lemon, is cooked so that the firm white flesh lifts precisely from the bone, with just a bowl of nubbly tartare. A side of hispi cabbage, charred to the sweet spot between crunch and slippery indulgence, gets a galvanising anchovy and chilli emulsion.

And so to the beef. Ordering ribeye, there's no "How would you like that cooked?", no folderol with optional sauces and garnishes, unless a fried egg winks at you from that puckish range of side orders. It's just an expertly grilled piece of loose and limber meat, blackened outside and garnet within, banging with all the bruised and sultry flavour the steak-eater travels hopefully for, but rarely arrives at. Decent french fries and house-made ketchup seal the deal.

There's only one dessert option, and it sounds unpromising – "deep-fried rice pudding with raspberries". But oh my, it's good, like stumbling across the missing link between arancini and a jam doughnut, with a sharp little shiver of fresh raspberries at its molten core.

With a £16.50 carafe of montepulciano, our bill for two comes to around £80, including service, which feels very decent value. As the two business lunchers at the next table part, one insists on picking up the bill with the intriguing throwaway line, "I know everyone hates us. That's why I get such a big expense account." We will never know.

At peak lunch, the room is as shouty and male as a City trading floor, but the staff approach with an intuitive delicacy that stops it from feeling blokey. It's tempting to lean back into the leather banquettes and make an afternoon of it. Simple, hospitable and confident, Hill & Szrok Public House is a direct descendant of the City chop house, with its own smart contemporary chops. It's the sort of start-up that deserves to stick around.

Food ****
Ambience ***
Service ****

Hill & Szrok Public House, 8 East Road, London N1 (020 7324 7799). Around £30 a head for three courses and a drink