Kitty Hawk review: The department store of dining

It's the first of five restaurants from the Wright & Bell Company, whose name, borrowed from Sir Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers, is a mark of its ambition. As is the Kitty Hawk, which fleshes out a grand old building near Liverpool Street station with five "departments of dining" – an oddly bureaucratic term for the bars, cafes and restaurants within. That said, keeping track of what they're all up to is an exercise in logistics.

The ground floor bar and kitchen, for example, kicks off the day at 7am, with tea, coffee and breakfast classics rom toast and pastries to the full English. Once brunch is out the way at 11.30am, it moves on to flatbreads, sliders and skewers and keeps them coming until closing time.

So far, so straightforward. But then there's the coffee bar and patisserie, which takes up the rest of the ground floor and, from 7am to 7pm, offers soups, salads and sandwiches, as well as cakes and other sweet treats, to take away or eat in. From 7pm to midnight, it switches to platters of cold meats and cheeses.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Downstairs, meanwhile, there's the restaurant, open from 11.30am until 10.30pm, and a private dining room, where you get to write the rules.

I arrive at 7.30pm to find the bar in the full swing and head downstairs to the relative calm of the restaurant. Despite the aeronautical name – Orville Wright made his maiden flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903 – the look is more maritime than aeronautical. Plaited ropes line the ceiling, softening what might otherwise have been quite a cavernous space.

Steak and shellfish are the twin specialities, so I order scallops and an Ashdale rump steak, aged for 35 days. All the beef here is sourced from a West Country family business that rears its cattle on open farmland.

Kitchens can be stingy with their scallops, but this one isn't. Plump and opalescent, the shellfish arrive with a generous accompaniment of pancetta and garden peas. The steak is as rich and savoury as you would expect from meat that has spent five weeks reaching peak maturity. Bordelaise sauce, a sweet and salty reduction of red wine, beef stock and bone marrow, brings out the best in it.

The pick of the puddings, unusually, is the fruit - albeit fruit spiked with fire and alcohol. It trundles out from the kitchen on a mobile stove, on which it's caramelised, sluiced with vodka and set alight. The flames stop just short of the ornamental rope, which is just as well. Smouldering hemp might attract the wrong crowd.

The Kitty Hawk, 11, 13 & 14 South Place, London EC2