http://www.85piccadilly.co.uk/restaurant
So good we ate here 3 days in a row - twice for breakfast, and once for dinner. The restaurant is by chef Ollie Dabbous (of his acclaimed but defunct eponymous restaurant) and the man behind Hedonism wines.
The decor and relaxed atmosphere are beautiful. Your eyes fixate to the sweeping oak staircase (which still smells of nice oak). It leads upstairs to Hide Above, a tasting menu-only restaurant for both lunch and dinner, and downstairs to Hide Below, an impressive bar with even Ichiro’s The Joker and such. The real treat is the hidden rooms, but more on that later.
We ate 3 times at Hide Ground, which does all meals - a superb breakfast (full English and the like, but also a fantastic French toast, homemade juices, Viennoiserie, etc), and a very nice lunch and dinner service, too. Sicilian red prawns, aged duck, turbot with roasted bones and lemon verbena sauce and golden ossetra caviar, etc. All Mariage-Frères teas with some nice caneles, etc. They even have an afternoon tea (in which we did not partake - we tried Claridge’s, The Ritz, and The Savoy…Claridge’s was our favorite).
We didn’t get to eat at Hide Above but the menu is ostensibly a bit more forward.
I don’t know of any other restaurant that executes at such a smooth level from breakfast through dinner. The breakfast is great, the product is strong, the dishes are very polished (a shoe-in for a 1* for Hide Ground), and the space is both impressive and relaxed. For a moment, you forget you’re on Piccadilly. Service was great throughout.
I’ll stop by here every time in London. I really wish we had something like this in the States; I just don’t know of it.
Some of our meals:
Turbot with sauce of roasted bones and lemon verbena, sea aster, caviar
Red Sicilian prawns with bouillon of roasted shells, fragrant herbs, dill, celery
Salmon cooked over cedar, with leek vinaigrette and herb butter
Strawberry Millefuille
Warm acorn cake, smoked caramel and rum poured tableside, Cornish clotted cream
Mariage Freres teas - our favorite was Milky Bleu
Caneles with bourbon cherries
Breakfast
Mango with tarragon, lime zest, and micro basil
“French toast” - excellent
Banana bread with smoked maple butter
Full English (subbed out black pudding) - really good.
Jam for the brioche toast - apricot infused with Mariage Freres “the sur le nil”
smoked eel omelette with frisee
Viennoiserie
Cellar goals, by Hedonism Wines (pretty expansive, gimme the other wall of Coche!)
Hide Below
Hide Above
View of Ground
“The Reading Room” private dining with vintage cookbook origami
