At Eclectic Hook & Master, Garces Dreams of Octopus — and Pizza

Photograph by Briana Farina

Jose Garces’s Hook & Master is a strange place. Right on the edge of gentrifying Kensington, it’s an octopus-themed Chicago-meets-Brooklyn pizza joint opened in the shell of the old Liquid Room. You can get kampachi crudo with yuzu and jalapeño, shrimp cooked in Calabrian chili butter, jumped-up tiki drinks — either at the main bar or in the tiki lounge upstairs — and Chicago-style deep-dish pies.

It’s a lot, I know. It’s the kind of restaurant I’d make up if I was telling a bad joke about desperate restaurateurs trying to smash together concepts in a misguided attempt at pleasing all the people, all the time. Except that here, it’s real. There’s a giant cartoon octopus painted on the outside, buoys hanging from the ceiling, cracker-crust tavern pies, Chicago pan and Brooklyn-style New York pizzas with blistered crusts topped with house-made sausage and long hots, plus special bowls of goop (Alfredo, ricotta with chili, herbed oil) just for dipping the crusts in.

Funny thing is, though, it works. Mostly because there’s a fuck-it-all sense of complete culinary absurdity permeating the place that I truly appreciate, but also because Garces knows how to make a themed restaurant that doesn’t feel like a theme restaurant, you know? He’s done Old Cuba (Rosa Blanca) and Mexican beach vibes (Buena Onda). Hell, he even had a pizza joint once before (24, in Old City), and even if that place — egoless, efficient and, ultimately, cold — was the exact opposite of this, it’s a historical counterweight that makes Hook & Master’s mashed-up, genre-fluid oddity even more fascinating to me. In this moment, in this place? The absurd feels almost comforting.

So, too, does a big-ass pizza — thick-crusted, high-walled, perfectly laced with that pan-pizza curtain of near-burnt cheese. A man of Chicago from way back, Garces knows what a Chicago deep-dish pie is supposed to taste like but goes his own way anyway, giving his a spicy red top and an architecture that feels more like a straight pan pizza than those coliseums of sauce and cheese that the Windy City is (shamelessly) known for. 

So is it good? Sure. The small plates are clever. The tavern-style thin-crust pizzas are admirably greasy, floppy in the middle and crisp at the edges, just the way I like. But more importantly, Hook & Master feels real. It feels like unapologetic love, isolation madness, and recursive obsessions given physical form — like this whole place was based on a dream Garces had once that he just couldn’t shake. One with a giant octopus who loved crudo and Chicago pizzas and rum. 

Like any dream, I’m not sure Hook & Master will last. But it’s worth enjoying while we can.

2 Stars — Come if you’re in the neighborhood

Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in the region
★★★★: come from anywhere in the country

Published as “The Octopus Dream” in the April 2022 issue of Philadelphia magazine.