They’ve spent a fortune on this new Piccadilly site, and hired a wunderkind chef, but the safe dishes still outnumber the exquisite ones
When everyone asks what Hide, the new, multi-floor dining extravaganza on London’s Piccadilly, is like, I say the journey to the loo is like swirling around inside an enormous acorn. A vast, oak staircase transports you from “Above”, the restaurant upstairs, to the bathroom, which smells like distilled autumn and plays piped Captain Beefheart. And when others ask me what Hide is like, I say it’s basically a whopping, glass-fronted luxury car showroom with Ollie Dabbous at the stoves.
If you book for the tasting menu at Above (there’s a slightly-less-high-end room downstairs called “Ground”), you end up eating at eye level with the top-deck passengers on the buses heading to Piccadilly Circus, which makes you feel a bit like a Rolls-Royce Phantom VIII in the window of HR Owen. At this point, some readers may be quite irate that I’m claiming “everyone” is obsessed with all-new Hide when they’ve never even heard of it. I sympathise – it’s like this, I know, in the provinces – but I assure you, in fancy London, it’s the most ruminated-over opening of 2018.
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