Restaurant review, Tramshed, 32 Rivington Street, London.

It's a basic principle of the restaurant trade that when planning your adventurous, seasonal menu, you should always include some safe bets. People know what they want when they eat out, and mostly, they want chicken and steak.

Instead of fighting against this tendency, Mark Hix has taken it as a challenge and run with it. His new restaurant, Tramshed, offers only two main-course options: chicken and steak. No fish, nothing for the vegetarians, just plain old chicken and steak. This idea seemed rather kooky when Mark first mooted it; after opening something like eight restaurants, The Independent's favourite chef has encouraged us to expect something more exciting than some Hixian variation on an Angus Steak House.

But beneath his somewhat ramshackle exterior beats the heart of a very canny restaurateur. Once he'd secured the landmark building, a former tramway generating station in the heart of fashionable Shoreditch, Hix knew instinctively what he wanted to do with it. The launch was delayed by planning wrangles for a year, but as the production team on this magazine know all too well, Mark isn't a man to be daunted by a missed deadline.

By the time Tramshed finally opened, that pared-down menu was perfectly in tune with the new trend of doing just a few things sensationally well. The launch generated the kind of excitement normally reserved for obscure pop-ups and secret supper clubs, rather than 150-seat restaurants from established industry figures.

Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk