Hill climbing

129 Holland Park Avenue,

London W11 3UT

Tel: 020 7221 5411

Open: 12-2.30pm lunch; 7-10.30pm dinner. Closed Saturday lunch

Head chef: Toby Hill

Brigade: Eight

Seats: 45

Cost: Set lunch £18 for two courses, £23 for three; à la carte lunch £28 for two courses, £35 for three. Dinner £35 for three courses. Average spend including wine is £37 at lunch and £55 at dinner

THE Halcyon is one of London's most peaceful hotels. It's a very chic, discreet townhouse in leafy Holland Park, favoured by media-shy celebrities who can hole-up away from the spotlight, or the not so media-shy who can take a brief rest from publicity.

But in the kitchen below the hotel's hushed corridors, something of a revolution has been taking place.

Newly-appointed head chef Toby Hill has turned the kitchen and restaurant on its head. In the six short weeks that he has been at the helm, the eating experience at The Room at the Halcyon has been transformed, and the very classical cooking style of Martin Hadden (now at Ockenden Manor, Cuckfield, West Sussex) abandoned in favour of food that, to quote the press release announcing Hill's arrival, is "light, seasonal and contemporary".

Hill has wasted no time in reorganising the kitchen layout to suit him. He has recruited a totally new brigade, including David Edwards, his sous chef at Gordleton Mill, Lymington, Hampshire (where Hill earned the restaurant a Michelin star in 1997), and Adam Simmons from Paul Heathcote's, Longridge, Lancashire. He has been busy front of house too, shocking waiters by insisting on silence during service, replacing the old plates with a new design, and contributing to plans for a complete refurbishment of the restaurant, due to take place in the New Year. Prices in The Room have been reduced to £35 for a three-course dinner, compared with £45.50 previously; and £18 for a two-course set lunch, or £23 for three courses.

"There has been so much to do; it's hard to come into a place that has been running at an existing level for so long," says Hill. "What struck me immediately was the lack of communication between the kitchen and restaurant. In the first week orders were coming through for sides of mash or chips. I was going up the wall."

As if that were not upheaval enough, Hill has been approached by the BBC to front its latest food project, a morning programme to be called The Club. "They want a totally new approach. I said if they let me be myself that's fine, but if they want me to bounce around with my arms in the air that's not my style."

He clearly thrives on being busy. He's hugely ambitious and insists that he accepted the job at the Halcyon as part of a conscious career plan rather than out of necessity, after hopes of setting up his own restaurant in London's Smithfield fell through in April 1998. Hill spent some time in Edinburgh before returning to London in September last year and a spell as head chef at Pierre Koffmann's Tante Claire restaurant in the Berkeley hotel. He stayed until December - "the food wasn't my style; it was very classical and non-changing and we were two very different personalities" - before taking on another temporary position as Gordon Ramsay's pastry chef.

While the stints in Koffmann's and Ramsay's kitchens were both brief, Hill has clearly taken a lot from both experiences. Cooking at the highest level for large numbers impressed upon him the importance of consistency. "With Pierre, we were doing 120 at night and 60-70 at lunch. I was really shocked by the consistency. That was the real killer, particularly as I hadn't been in a proper kitchen for a long time." The same lesson was learnt with Ramsay. "To see the consistency in Gordon's kitchen is phenomenal. A lot is down to Mark [Askew, head chef] and staff who give everything. If anyone deserves a third star it's Gordon. It's his consistency that marks him out from two-star level. Every dish goes out like a mirror of the last one. That's the challenge I've got here."

Hill has wasted no time creating a menu at the Halcyon to enable him to meet that challenge, though he denies he is star-chasing - at least for the time being. He has refined some of his favourite dishes from the Provence restaurant at Gordleton Mill, and fortunately they were all in place by the time Michelin paid a visit on day three of Hill's tenure at the Halcyon.

Fish has always been a favourite of Hill's. He buys from three suppliers, all of whom, he says, understand exactly what he wants. He, in turn, is flexible enough to work with what they have on a particular day. "I love John Dory. It's probably one of the hardest fish to cook because it carries on cooking after you take it out of the pan, so it can easily be tough. Timing is crucial - you've only got at few seconds." On the current dinner menu, John Dory is served sautéd with crispy bacon, summer vegetables and a brown chicken jus. Roast fillet of sea bass comes with langoustine beignets, confit of baby fennel and a red pepper vinaigrette, while the grilled baby lobster with asparagus, leeks and a vanilla jus (see recipe) is a Joel Robuchon dish that is going down very well, despite the £6 supplement. "Something I've realised here is that nobody really cares about money. We put the menu price down and they just spend more on wine or they go for the most expensive dishes."

Hill has put a supplement on the beef dish, too, to try and stem demand. "Last Thursday I did 27 beef and wasn't turning anything else over, so we put a fiver on it and it didn't make a blind bit of difference!" Still, the beef dish is far from run of the mill, so could justify the extra cost in itself. The meat is from catering butcher Donald Russell - "as far as I'm concerned you can't get better than that," says Hill - and is very slightly smoked over an intense heat for seven minutes. "You get the aroma of the smoke afterwards and you know there's something special but you're not sure what. The sauce is made from smoked beef bones. It's something I learnt from Raymond Blanc and it brings out the real flavour of the beef." At the Mill, the menu specified "smoked" but he makes no reference to the technique on this menu. "I want to take off what isn't necessary and be left with the essence - and make sure the essence is perfect and that everything is part of the dish. At the Mill I got so used to making the dish visually stunning."

He is careful not to mix flavours and over-complicate the duck dish, too. "The duck is marinated in the same marinade the Chinese use for crispy duck but we wipe them clean so it's quite a delicate flavour. I'm not one to mix flavours." The caramelised breast of duck is served pink with braised lettuce, baby vegetables and a five-spice sauce.

Among the starters, the red mullet and saffron soup is a dish Hill first tasted when it was made by Marco Pierre White, while he was at the Hyde Park hotel. "We made our own version. It needs extremely fresh fish, lots of red wine and loads of saffron. It's marinated for a day and passed through three different sizes of sieve so it's a long process but the result is worth it." While the soup will stay as it is, other starters are to be tweaked: the tian of crab, avocado and smoked salmon with a lemon vinaigrette will become a ravioli; and a tomato sorbet is to be added to the salad of roasted sea scallops and ratatouille.

But Hill is probably best known for his puddings. The pistachio parfait with caramelised bananas and rum syrup (see recipe) has been refined since it last appeared at the Provence. He uses a better-quality pistachio paste, and the caramelised bananas and rum syrup are new to the dish. He insists that he is trying to cut out the spun sugar decoration. "All the desserts at the Provence were very pretty-pretty, but my food has moved on now."

Still, looks clearly sell, and Hill is convinced that if one person orders the parfait, 10 others will do so too. "Last night one guy had three desserts. I thought he might be an inspector, but he just said he had the parfait to start with then he wanted to try more."

Lightness is the underlying theme in the pudding menu. "I want people to come to the end of a meal and not feel bloated but wish they could have eaten everything. I like meals to end on a high." The citrus fruit terrine is typical of Hill's philosophy: "We did it at the Manoir [aux Quat'Saisons, Oxfordshire, where Hill was briefly pastry chef] and I did it again with Gordon and now here. I think it'll turn into a modern classic, it's so refreshing." The dish is served with orange and grapefruit segments, a passion fruit coulis and passion fruit and banana sorbet.

And ice-creams and sorbets accompany virtually every pudding. "I'm a big sorbet and ice-cream maker. I generally like to mix fruit pulp half and half with fresh fruit. We then boil it very quickly so we don't lose the freshness, pass it, and ice it down so that it goes from cold to hot to cold extremely quickly. If the sorbet is ice-cold before you churn it it freezes very quickly so you get less air and the texture is smoother."

While running the fine-dining restaurant is Hill's key job, he has also been responsible for revamping the bar and 24-hour room service menus. The bar now offers sushi, samosas, oysters and caviare instead of hamburgers, chips and beef sandwiches, while a room service menu has been created to be a fail-safe ‘boil-in-the-bag' job for the night staff. "I expect standards to be the same at all times of day and night," says Hill. Breakfast has also changed, to include more cheese, meat, a cold buffet and greater selection of breads.

Hill appears to dread standing still, both in terms of his food and the environment in which he works. "I like it when there's lots to do. I don't like it when it's all done. I hope in two years I'll look back at the food I'm cooking now and think I've evolved. I can still go a lot further."

But what will never change is the disciplined way he runs his empire. "We get lots of famous people in - Leonardo di Caprio has been and Robert de Niro comes in a lot. We've had Elle MacPherson, Rolf Harris and Bob Dylan, too. But to me, a customer is a customer, and I'd rather have the place buzzing than dotted with celebrities. And nobody gets a side order of chips - not even Bob Dylan." n