‘I’m pretty sure that staircase cost more than the whole of my last restaurant,’ Ollie Dabbous tells me as we stand on the top floor of his huge new restaurant, admiring a beautifully hand-carved wooden banister, shaped like the roots of a tree. While it was still a building site when I visited – the builders were halfway through installing the front door – two things were clear: there is an incredible amount of money behind this place, and it is one of the most ambitious restaurant projects I’ve ever seen.
Hide (which opened in April 2018) is, in fact, two restaurants (totalling 184 covers) and a bar within one building across three floors. There’s ‘Above’, which will offer higher-end tasting menus and a set lunch; ‘Ground’, which serves an all-day à la carte menu (from breakfast and lunch to afternoon tea, dinner and late night snacks); and ‘Below’, which features a wine cellar and bar complete with snacks. It’s open seven days a week, from 7.30am to the early hours. Ollie is the executive chef and co-owner, alongside cocktail guru Oskar Kinberg and Yevgeny Chichvarkin, owner of Hedonism Wines (which will be sorting the vast wine and spirit list).
The sheer scale and budget of Hide makes it a completely different beast to Dabbous, the small Michelin-starred restaurant that Ollie opened on a shoestring to critical acclaim. When it closed back in 2017, no one was quite sure why. After seeing Hide, it makes perfect sense. ‘Once I got an idea of how big Hide was going to be, that’s when I decided to close Dabbous,’ says Ollie. ‘I had achieved more than I ever hoped I could there, and it just felt like the right time to move on and do something different. The last thing I would’ve wanted was to see Dabbous neglected in any way, and a place like this needs my full attention.’