To be a restaurant critic is to be perpetually sort of lost. Much of my professional life is spent scanning the outside of unfamiliar buildings to find wilfully discreet signage and, in the unlikely event they ever make a commemorative statue of me, then its truest form would be a bronze of a harried man frowning at Google Maps.Even in this context, however, Maene — a new Spitalfields spot from restaurateur and chef Nick Gilkinson — struck me as an opening that was unusually determined to not be found.
Tucked away amid Fashion Street’s converted warehouses, it has nothing at ground level to mark it out and its GPS location seems to float in some inaccessible multiverse. Yes, there is a big “M” jutting out of the wall near its designated address but if you peer in through the windows, then you will see that this denotes something called Mission: a multi-storey yoga studio and café that you’d only realise was connected to Maene if you’d checked it in advance.
If that sounds unnecessarily fiddly for a business at least partially reliant on passing trade, then that’s because it is. “We’ve been saying Mission is the perfect name because it’s a mission to find us,” joked one member of the team, once I’d finally made my way into an inevitably empty lunch service.
Now the standard gear-shift here would be to tell you that this is a place where your intrepid perseverance is resoundingly rewarded. And this is true, up to a point. But I am opening with this strange, unintentional game of hide-and-seek because it speaks, more generally, to some of the confused thinking and absent meticulousness hampering an otherwise perfectly lovely venture.
That said, the space at Maene — an olde English word meaning “community” — is airy gorgeousness incarnate: a sprawled, fourth-floor mass of filament bulbs, voluptuous cobalt blue banquettes, and gauzy white curtains that, strangely enough, has the feel of an upscale Mykonian hideaway. That waft of escape is equally evident in head chef Amber Francis’s menu: a brutally concise one-pager that marries hemp-trousered, strictly seasonal modern British (think ferments and foraging and an emphasis on provenance that stops just short of listing a postcode for the tomatoes) with a lusty streak of Aperol-swigging continental abandon.
Gnocco fritto brought ravishing, warm lances of oil-puffed dough beside a gooey, marbled marvel of a squash, stracciatella and chilli oil dip. Sunflower seed “tahini” was deftly seasoned. Fat, creamy mussels drank deep from a terrific surrounding lake of cider and butter sauce. And as I am currently not boozing, I loved that the nuanced, clever cocktails (like the apple-laced, better-than-it-sounds Flat Sparkling Wine) all come in alcohol-free versions.
As the lunch offering at Maene is limited to 15 or so items — less a thin menu so much as one doing aggressive calisthenics — the lack of variety can’t help but feel disappointing
The issue, at both my visits, was one of repetition. Ho-hum pork loin arrived with scorched spring greens and a gritty walnut pesto; both purple potatoes and a middling coco bean cassoulet — draped in more charred greenery — were served with salsa verdes. These would feel like ignorable aberrations if there were more dishes available, as at Gilkinson’s highly rated Whitechapel place, Townsend. But as the lunch offering at Maene is limited to 15 or so items — less a thin menu so much as one doing aggressive calisthenics and semaglutide injections — the lack of variety couldn’t help but feel disappointing.
If there is a caveat, then it would be that it is very early days (a more expansive brunch menu has recently emerged). And it should also be noted that a shared pudding — an utterly hypnotic pine panna cotta, firmly nudged towards creme caramel territory — underlined the kind of indulgent inventiveness Gilkinson, Francis and their team are capable of. More than this, it was one of the moments when Maene’s commendable, loca-vore limitations didn’t feel… well, quite so limiting. It will surely blossom when its roof terrace opens and I am mostly glad I tracked it down. The next phase, I think, will be for this well-intentioned, slightly undercooked sequel to properly find itself.
