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Please note, since this review was published Hide Above has introduced à la carte options alongside its tasting menu. Time Out Food editors, NOVEMBER 2019.
Above is the more expensive first-floor restaurant of super-chef Ollie Dabbous’s Michelin-starred restaurant-and-bar complex Hide. It’s a tasting menu only here, folks. The look, meanwhile, is pale and airy: the tasteful yin to Hide Ground’s yang. Wrap around glass means views over Piccadilly’s traffic on to the trees of Green Park. The furniture is all smooth curves, the lighting ultra-designer (think oversized upside-down eggshells).
The cooking is exceptional. Meticulous and technical while also playful (snacky charcuterie wrapped around giant feathers; a dessert of poached pineapple with a foamy kaffir lime sorbet served inside a pineapple). Petals, oils, things cut into impossibly small pieces. Oh, and a cheese trolley of your dreams, with gleaming cloches and a chutney mixed at the table. They add apple vinegar with a tiny pipette to a wrinkly poached pomme, then crush it all up with a pestle. Sigh.
The service, likewise, is solicitous, skilled and serene. Unfortunately, the tasting menu is currently a brutal £115 per person. And that’s just for the food (the wine list is an oenophile’s dream, but no less pricey). The better value option is the terrific set lunch – also with lots of frills and freebies – which clocks in at £48 a head. This is a polite, refined place for foodie pilgrims with (very) deep pockets.