Above – and beyond

Hide is a £20 million restaurant at the Green Park end of Piccadilly, on the three lower floors of a brutalist box by Clarges Street. From outside it looks like an illustration from a storybook: people eating while illuminated in glass boxes. It is a restaurant to be looked at from outside, a restaurant with no skin.

Hide is the fourth restaurant from Ollie Dabbous, who is the most talented British chef of his generation, even if you think that dowsing food in flowers is very irritating. Dabbous, which opened in 2012, offered fairy food near Tottenham Court Road, which needs it badly: strange decapitated eggs, a carpet of flowers, nuts, hay. It was glintingly metaphorically, instantly famous, then it closed. Now, with a bag of Russian gold, Dabbous has made Hide, with Hedonism Wines. The food and the gold may be spiritually incongruent but it works in Shoreditch. We shall see.

You enter through a tall door of rough wood; I am fairly certain that Dabbous’s essential inspiration is Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree but that is normal at this stage of empire. There is a bar in the cellar (Hide Below), an informal restaurant — such things are relative — on the ground floor (Hide Ground), and a showcase restaurant above (Hide Above), invented to collect Michelin stars, as if with a restaurant-net. For Dabbous they probably would be real stars, shrunken and stored in a freezer disguised as a glade.

Hide is wood, as if the diner is trapped in a sophisticated, knowing tree. The staircase is curling, immense and bespoke. The tables are round and widely spaced. Leaves are etched onto walls; the lights are half-eggs, broken, brittle and painted gold inside. The view is the Piccadilly bus lane.