Public House – the hospitality group founded by Phil Winser, James Gummer and Olivier van Themsche – is on a tear. Over the past few years it has studiously revitalised the concept of the elevated British pub with Notting Hill’s The Pelican, Charlbury bolthole The Bull, The Hero in Maida Vale and the Fat Badger off Golborne Road, all of which offer seasonal British cooking in handsome, rustic fit-outs by the group’s in-house design studio. Now, it’s opened The Hart, a multi-level pub on the corner of Marylebone’s Chiltern Street.
The Hart might be Public House’s purest reversion to classic pub metrics yet. The stag painted on its sign fits with the group’s menagerie theme, and its name harks back to the Hart family, which ran a boozer there in the 1840s called the Wallace Head.
As with the other Public House renos, the building was stripped back and rebuilt with the company’s signature polished but rustic aesthetic, with plenty of natural woods and rough stucco plaster. But here, intimate nooks and low ceilings take the place of the airy open spaces and lofty windows found in its other venues. There are Victorian-style partitions and rope-wrapped columns, as well as bespoke sconces and stained glass in the downstairs booths, which are some of the only original Georgian features retained in the refit. Throughout, there’s a “reinterpretation of repetitive patterns originally seen in the cornicing features to ground the design”, the group’s lead designer, Leticia Blakiston Houston, tells Broadsheet.
The layout is tight and rises vertically instead of expanding horizontally, creating “moments of discovery [and] a gradual sense of elevation and surprise”, according to Blakiston Houston. You enter through the bustling ground-floor bar, round a tight staircase past the open kitchen, and head up to the dining room, with its beamed and mirrored ceiling.
The food hews simple and sustainable, with ingredients drawn from small-scale producers and Public House’s own kitchen gardens near Charlbury in Oxfordshire. The menu descriptions are minimalist – smoked eel, celeriac; crab cakes; chicken, anchovy – but belie deft work behind the pass. Highlights include the blushing rump steak with a mound of roasties and crisp sage, and the throwback slab of banoffee pie. The wine list skews global (from classic bordeaux to a few more esoteric natty bottles) and the pints are British. Speedier options like soups and salad cater to local workers, says Gummer, who looks after the menu and operations.
Despite the heightened focus on nostalgia (there’s an old-school lamb chop dish on the menu, as well as a kedgeree), the menu here expands on the other Public House sites without feeling like a retread.
“What we really like about the food culture of the company is that we do have these parameters within which all of our individual chefs work,” Gummer says. “But it’s interesting to see how they take that brief and put their own personal stamp on it. You see their different personalities come through on the plate.”
The Hart
56 Blandford Street, W1U 7JA
0203 468 1647
Hours:
Mon to Thu midday–11.30pm
Fri & Sat midday–midnight
Sun midday–11pm
