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.
